Better Living Through Birding by Christian Cooper;

Author:Christian Cooper; [Cooper, Christian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC
Published: 2023-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

8

Elegy

I gasped the first time I saw it. It was akin to looking upon a pair of beautiful, mournful ghosts of what once had been.

Every year, in remembrance of the 2,763 people who died when the twin towers of the World Trade Center fell, the New York City skyline is pierced by two beacons shooting up as if from their footprint. For several days around the anniversary of the attacks, the columns of light ascend, visible for miles in any direction on a clear night.

The Tribute in Light was originally planned as a onetime memorial. But its shining, ethereal presence moved so many that it became an annual occurrence, a cry from the heart of New York.

But it had an unexpected downside: It became a potential death trap for birds making the long journey south before winter takes hold. Most songbirds migrate at night, to keep cool during their marathon of exertion and to reduce their exposure to predators; they navigate in part by the stars, and they can be drawn to an intense light source, like the eighty-eight xenon spotlights of the Tribute in Light. So on some nights, confused flocks wheeled in ceaseless spirals around the beacons, risking death from either exhaustion or collision with the surrounding skyscrapers. From an ecological standpoint, the timing couldn’t be worse: Those days in September are typically the height of fall migration activity in New York City. Something meant to exalt the dead seemed destined to become an annual killing machine of its own.

New York City Audubon, dedicated to protecting the area’s birds, and the producers of the Tribute in Light art installation seemed headed for a collision of their own. But instead of engaging in a costly and protracted fight over this, they chose to cooperate. Volunteers from NYC Audubon stay up all night for every night of the Tribute, staring up at the sky from the foot of the site, and count how many birds they see in twenty minutes; the count thus monitors the density of birds, and when too many have been snared by the beams, the lights are temporarily turned off, long enough for the flocks to regain their bearings and disperse. In this way, thousands of avian lives are spared. And the Tribute in Light, in addition to eulogizing those we lost on September 11, 2001, becomes a tribute to what we can accomplish when we pull together with mutual respect to solve a problem.

Not much else good came out of that day.

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