Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from University of Kansas Publications, Museum of Natural History, Vol. 10: 1956-1960
Considerable interest has been occasioned in recent years in the eastern United States by large-scale accidents to night-migrating birds. Most accidents have occurred in the autumn. The wide spread adoption by airports of an instrument called the ceilometer, which measures the height of cloud ceilings by reflecting from them a high-powered beam of light, has proved under certain conditions to be catastrophic to night-?ying birds. Among the recent reports of such accidents are those of Spofford (1949) and Laskey (1951) for Nashville, Tennessee, Howell and Tanner 1951) for Knoxville, Tennessee, and Lovell (1952) for Louisville, Kentucky. Recently Howell, Laskey, and Tanner (1954) reviewed ceilometer tragedies without being able to determine the exact reason for their lethal effectiveness. Less publicized so far have been mass collisions of birds with another class of Obstacles, tall radio and television towers. These slender towers, usually 500 to 1000 feet tall, are increasing rapidly in numbers and there is reason to suppose that they will take a correspondingly larger toll of bird life.
Notice has long been given by ornithologists to mass destruction of birds by more conventional solid Obstructions to passage, and newspapers occasionally mention birds killed at such well-known points as the Washington Monument and the Empire State Build Ing.
Seventy-five years ago, J. A. Allen (1880) published the results of questionnaires circulated by William Brewster to lighthouse keepers. Brewster himself (1886) described destruction of birds at a lighthouse in the Bay of Fundy, paying keen attention to be havior of the birds and the exact conditions under which nocturnal flight and accidents occurred. The subject also received attention in several countries across the Atlantic. Destruction of birds at Irish lighthouses was carefully noted over a period of years and the results were published periodically, culminating in R. M. Barring ton's massive report 1900) which remains in some ways the most thorough of its type.
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