How Lights Out Cleveland Is Helping Save Birds

Vince Adamus wakes up at 4:30 am every spring morning, shaves, showers and drives to downtown Cleveland to walk his beat. Armed with a butterfly net, a sling bag and a vest, he connects with his group before sunrise in front of the Drury Hotel, where they form a circle of five and plan out their morning routes. 

Each day, a lead volunteer designates who will go where, the equipment needed and the group member responsible for collecting data at the completion of the walk. This morning, Adamus will patrol downtown’s Gateway District, with a laminated map that has the neighborhood’s parking garages marked on it.

Adamus briskly strides south down East Sixth Street in the predawn, making his way toward Progressive Field before eventually detouring into a multistory parking garage. With flashlight in hand, he walks up and down the garage stairs. After 20 minutes spent walking his route, Adamus rounds a glass-sided building, aims his flashlight into the darkness ahead and finds the first victim of the day: a tiny, brown-and-white-headed bird, lying motionless on the pavement.

From his experience, Adamus immediately knows this bird is a white-throated sparrow. He puts his backpack down, calmly lifts the deceased bird, makes identifying notes and tucks it away in his paper collection bag before continuing along his route. 

Finding dead birds isn’t new for Adamus. He’s been on this morning patrol since 2019. He says it still stings each time he finds one though, and he often thinks, “What a wasted death.” He also knows there will be more. After all, he’s a volunteer with Lights Out Cleveland.

Lights Out Cleveland volunteer Vince Adamus (right) and his walking partner Debra Jasionowski (left) identify a deceased bird. (photo by Matt Shiffler)

As Cleveland’s lighthouses beckon to Great Lakes freighters, the city’s brightly lit buildings act as killing magnets for songbirds. Ohio Lights Out aims to combat that. Founded in 2014 and coordinated by the Ohio Bird Conservation Initiative, Ohio Lights Out is a collaboration of local organizations that support bird conservation. The program’s goal is to reduce light pollution in cities to create a safer urban environment for nocturnally migrating birds. There are Lights Out organizations in Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Akron, Canton, Dayton and Toledo, and according to Lights Out Cleveland Volunteer Coordinator Jake Kudrna, the Cleveland branch has around 65 active volunteers but would like to double that number to improve route coverage.  

The breadth of groups in Ohio alone shows just how big of a problem birds colliding with buildings has become. A 2024 study by the NYC Bird Alliance, a nonprofit organization that works to protect birds and their habitats in New York City, analyzed over 3,100 bird-into-building collisions across urban, suburban and rural areas. The study estimated that as many as 1 billion birds may die each year from striking buildings and windows in the United States. 

Ohioan, renowned naturalist and expert birder Kenn Kaufman has been fascinated with birds since age 6. In his book, A Season on the Wind: Inside the World of Spring Migration, he tells of how the Lake Erie shoreline is famous for its migratory birds, writing, “In the immediate vicinity of the lakeshore, so many small birds will concentrate that they’ll  be impossible to ignore.” A glowing city like Cleveland acts as a perfect rest stop. Because birds navigate by lights and the stars, light pollution caused by humans easily attracts them. 

“We’ve seen radar data showing birds coming across Lake Erie at night and turning towards Cleveland because of the lighting,” says Matthew Shumar, program coordinator for the Ohio Bird Conservation Initiative, “Green space, trees and landscaping are reflected in glass windows. Birds see what looks like habitat, they fly into it and hit glass.” 

A white-throated sparrow is identified by the Lights Out Cleveland team (left) and Lights Out Cleveland volunteer Kent Starrett sets out on his route (right). (photos by Matt Shiffler)

Simply put, birds don’t perceive reflective glass the way humans do. To address this problem, The National Audubon Society, a nonprofit organization that has protected birds since 1905, established the first Lights Out program in Chicago in 1999. In 2023, more than 1,000 migrating birds struck the city’s McCormick Place Convention Center overnight, killing most of them instantly.

“It was just like a carpet of dead birds at the windows there,” David Willard, a retired bird division collections manager at the Chicago Field Museum, told a reporter for the Associated Press shortly after the event.

Lights Out Cleveland began making its rounds in 2017, with volunteers searching for injured and dead birds daily during spring (mid-March to early June) and fall (mid-August to mid-November) migrations. Volunteers are assigned routes, including ones near buildings where bird collisions are known to occur, and walk up to 7 miles per shift. 

They log the birds they find with relevant species and demographic information and send them to the University of Michigan, where they become part of scientific collections for research use, if they are deceased. (The birds were previously sent to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.) Shumar says the research they’ve uncovered relates to the transmission of pests and parasites within the birds and offers insight into their migratory patterns.

If the birds are still alive, they are taken to wildlife rehabilitation specialist Tim Jasinski at the Lake Erie Nature & Science Center in the Cleveland suburb of Bay Village. The center helps the birds heal and regain their strength. In a 6-year period, it successfully returned almost 6,000 birds to the wild. 

Key Tower security guard Julio Sanchez holds a saved bird. (photo by Matt Shiffler)

As of April 2025, Kudrna says the Lights Out Cleveland team has collected over 20,000 injured or dead birds since the program’s inception. The group generally finds between 2,500 and 3,000 birds per year (live and dead), according to Shumar. 

Innovations such as bird-safe glass films have helped in curbing the problem. Since 2006, Toronto-based Feather Friendly has made bird-safe glass products featuring little dots and markers that break up a window’s reflection. You roll on the sticker and peel off the backing, which leaves behind the pattern that birds can see, and humans  generally cannot.

Cleveland State University’s Cleveland-Marshall College of Law Library has seen success in using this bird-safe film. There have been zero reported bird deaths at the building since the installation in 2019.

And remember McCormick Place in Chicago? The center installed bird-safe film in summer 2024, and its bird-strike incident and collisions were down 95% within the first year. In fall 2024, the Cleveland Cavaliers’ Rocket Arena also invested in bird-safe applications for its glass-sided downtown arena. But the problem isn’t tied solely to high-rise buildings.

Deceased birds found by Lights Out Cleveland used to be taken to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. (photo by Matt Shiffler)

“Ninety-nine percent of all bird-building collisions globally happen at residential and low-rise commercial buildings,” Shumar says. 

We can help that effort by turning off unneeded lights from dusk until dawn, which decreases the sort of light pollution that leads to bird strikes.

Progress has been made on reducing preventable bird-building collisions, but the work of Lights Out Cleveland and other organizations continues. Adamus, for one, is still walking his morning beat, looking for birds that have lost their way during the night.  

“I really hate mornings, I always have,” he says. “But I get up at 4:30 to do this because it’s worth it. It’s something I can do to make a difference.”

Lights Out Cleveland is always looking for more volunteers. You can apply by visiting ohiolightsout.org.