Birdcast migration forecast for the nights of 10 & 11 Sept 2025 (screenshots from Birdcast)

10 September 2025

BirdCast predicts that the next two nights, 10 and 11 September, will be fantastic for bird migration. The forecast screenshots, above, show that 261,000,000 to 294,000,000 birds will pass over the continental US in just two nights. Tonight and Thursday night it’s Lights Out For Birds, Please! Yes, turn lights out at home. If you’re not familiar with what to do, read on.

Birds that migrate at night use celestial lights for navigation and are often fooled by and attracted to our electric lights. This is especially true of warblers who hatched in dark sky places and are unfamiliar with human lights. They collide with lit buildings or exhaust themselves flying circles around them.

Isn’t bird collision just a tall building problem? No. Amazingly the toll at homes — in total — is higher than total collisions at tall buildings because there are so many more homes.

The lights at this house would fool migratory birds. (Fortunately it is lit for Christmas when no birds are migrating.)

Your home might have a problem you’re not aware of.

Do birds hit your sliding glass door? Do you find dead birds occasionally below your windows? You can do your bit on high migration nights by closing drapes and turning off outside lights. (Motion detection lights are fine.)

The cool thing is that you don’t have to be a building manager or a scientist to help migratory birds. You can help them with Lights Out practices on the few high migration nights each season.

Not sure why birds hit your house? See this article about birds and windows: Think Like A Bird, What Do You See?

Read more about Birdcast, lights out, and bird statistics here: BirdCast: Lights Out.