And Georgia has Lights Out efforts throughout the state. Recently, the three largest cities in North Carolina -Charlotte, Raleigh, and Winston-Salem -joined suit. There are currently 47 cities in the United States that take part. Lights Out programs started to become popular in the United States around 20 years ago, and what started as a grassroots effort now has country-wide reach through Audubon's national Lights Out program. According to Audubon’s Lights Out program, when you convince building owners, managers, and homeowners to turn off excess lighting during the months of bird migration, you are helping birds have a safe passage between their nesting and wintering ground. Around the United States, cities and communities have decided to implement Lights Out programs. There is an easy solution to stopping these bird mortalities: Turn off non-essential lighting.

In recent years, a couple of mass-casualty events of night-migrating birds in Galveston, Texas, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has raised awareness of this danger, and people across the country are taking action. When buildings use a lot of exterior lighting, it disorients the birds and causes them to crash.

Light pollution has an outsized impact on migrating birds.

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