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Birds exposed to artificial lights at night nest up to a month earlier than those dwelling away from humanity’s glow, according to a study published recently in
Nature. But, perhaps counterintuitively, this disruption may actually benefit some birds in part by helping them adjust as global warming alters the rhythms of the natural world.
The new paper offers a continent-wide, multispecies look at the impact of light and noise pollution
on birds’ reproductive success, with the hope of giving land managers more concrete information to make conservation decisions. Using data gathered by citizen scientists through the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s NestWatch program, the study’s authors analyzed more than 58,000 nest observations for 142 species in the contiguous U.S. between 2000 and 2014.