Lighted Towers and Flying Birds

According to a cellular-news.com article, more than 6 million birds are killed every year by the 84,000 communication towers across North America. The tallest 1.9% of these towers account for 71% of these avian mortalities. Researchers have found that birds particularly circle towers with solid red lights, causing them to run into the cables propping the tower up. Towers with blinking red lights, on the other hand, seem to cause fewer deaths. A study estimates, therefore, that replacing steady-burning lights with blinking lights on only the tallest towers (the roughly 4,500 towers greater than 150 meters tall) could reduce bird fatalities from communication towers by about 45 percent, or about 2.5 million birds.