Hi Peter,
Almost all of these crashes happen at night. Recently fledged petrels and
shearwaters seem particularly attracted to bright lights and so crashing
into buildings seems to be associated with bright night lighting. Crashing
onto roofs can also be associated with moonlight reflecting off of shiny
tin. Fiji Petrels are suspected to breed on mountain peaks so the young
would have to overfly more land and a potential ring of coastal villages to
reach the sea. Thus they may be a little more prone to this than other
species that nest right on the coast.
Adult seabirds are also disorientated by bright lights at night but most
incidents where numbers of birds crash onto the decks of ships or on land
near breeding sites are associated with thick fog or falling snow.
Presumably adult seabirds have mostly learnt to ignore single bright lights
but they get into trouble when there is lots of reflective light.
Huge numbers of night-flying migrant land birds die in the northern
hemisphere each year for the same reasons. We don’t have the same numbers of
night-flying migrant land birds here in Australia, but there was an
interesting paper about six species of quail that were attracted to lights
and were often first detected when they crashed into tin roofs in the
township of Eungella, QLD. The paper was appropriately titled “Quail that go
bump in the night” [Crouther & Crouther (1999) Corella 23: 43-47].
Cheers,
Rohan
Rohan Clarke
www.wildlifeimages.com.au
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