Removing Lights Dangerous to Birds Could Win Support from Both Sides
ORLANDO, Fla. -- Removing steady-burning red lights from wireless towers could reduce migratory bird fatalities while quelling tower companies’ cost and public opposition fears, panelists representing tower company and environmental interests said Tuesday at the PCIA conference in Orlando. The migratory bird issue is at the center of a planned FCC rulemaking and litigation in the D.C. Circuit U.S. Appeals Court. PCIA leads a group called Solving the Avian Tower Interaction Committee (STATIC) whose members come from both sides of the debate and aim to reach a voluntary rather than regulatory solution.
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To aid pilots, the FAA requires towers more than 200 feet tall to use two red obstruction lights, one steady and one blinking. However, the steady light lures migratory birds susceptible to tower deaths; removing it can reduce bird deaths 50 to 70 percent, said Joelle Gehring, a Michigan State scientist and STATIC facilitator.
One solution is to replace the steady light with a white strobe, but this is considered unreasonable by tower companies. Unless they receive “more definitive” proof, tower companies don’t want to spend $1,000 to $20,000 per tower installing white strobes, said American Towers’ Jenna Lamontagne. Even if the money is spent, white strobes are a greater visual annoyance than the red lights and won’t be popular with neighbors, she said. Tower companies would get “tremendous opposition,” she said.
Pilots don’t like white strobes, either, said FAA’s Jim Patterson. But LED lights and other recent technological advancements could strike a balance between bird and pilot safety, he said. Still, a technological alternative might not take care of replacement cost problems, he said.
Simply removing the steady light and leaving the blinking one is an alternative both sides might agree to, but the FAA must make sure doing so doesn’t reduce pilot safety. STATIC is consulting the FAA about revisiting the 30-year old rule dictating the current 2-light system, Gehring said. Removing the steady light “may be a good direction to go in” if the FAA allows it, said Lamontagne. If there were a process in place to request tower light removals, “we're for it,” she said.
Bird deaths at towers aren’t just determined by lighting, Gehring said. Towers measuring about 1000 feet kill five times as many birds as those about 475 feet, she said. And towers with guy wires kill 16 times more than ones without, she said. On existing towers, however, these issues are far more difficult to address than lighting, she said. On new towers, the problem doesn’t apply since they usually don’t have guy wires and are under 300 feet tall, Lamontagne said.
American Tower hasn’t seen proof its towers are killing birds, Lamontagne said. “To draw the conclusion that millions of birds are being killed… simply does not match what we're seeing at any of our operations.” Most birds die at towers while roosting, she said. American Towers adheres to environmental laws; that its towers could be killing birds is “unsettling,” she said.
American Tower may not be finding dead migratory birds because migrations occur in a different season than roosting activity, Gehring said. It also may not have proper protocol for locating the birds, she said. Dead migratory birds are not always “littered underneath towers” and can be harder to find, she said. Gehring’s research team doesn’t “find dead birds every day,” and some towers have “more obvious” adverse impact than others, she said.