Action Alert: Lighting Ordinance in Chesapeake

The Chesapeake City Council is considering an ordinance on Tuesday, 6/16, to allow the illumination of the 660-foot-tall LS Greenlink tower being built along the Southern Branch of the Elizabeth River, just south of Paradise Creek Park.   We have gotten the Planning Commission to amend the ordinance to require the lights to be turned off between 10 pm and dawn.   But we still need help to get the City to dim the allowed brightness shining into Paradise Creek Park and the river.   

The City Council meeting starts at 6:30 pm; come speak out for the birds.  Persons wishing to speak at the City Council hearing must submit a speaker card before 6:30 pm.  Can't make the meeting? Email council@cityofchesapeake.net with your concerns; reference PLN-TXT-2025-004 External Building Lighting.   See the meeting information and the agenda here. 

Some key talking points:

For wildlife, the best practice would be to not light up this tower.  If the building must be lit, we strongly urge that the ordinance incorporate key safeguards to reduce the number of birds killed at the site, and the wildlife disturbed in neighboring parks and along the river. Two key safeguards we ask to be included in the ordinance are: 

• turning off the lights from 10 pm to dawn daily
• minimize the illumination levels permitted, which should be less than 0.5 foot-candles at the property boundary with parks, conservation lands, wetlands, or residential properties.

Building lights, especially those of tall buildings, are a deadly hazard to migrating birds. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology estimates that hundreds of millions of birds are killed each year in building collisions. Well-lit skyscrapers such as the Greenlink tower pose a severe threat. Chesapeake is along the Atlantic Migratory Flyway. Birds primarily migrate at night in huge flocks. Lights on tall buildings disorient and attract these migrating flocks, often causing them to circle the building endlessly until exhausted. Birds also crash into the structure and are killed. The situation becomes even worse during low cloud or foggy weather conditions.  

The City of Chesapeake Comprehensive Plan, pp. 213-214, recognizes this threat and clearly states that "while lights may be a nuisance for residents, for wildlife it can be more serious, rendering habitat unlivable or confusing animals’ natural patterns. Birds in particular may be susceptible to light pollution as most migratory birds fly at night, and can be disoriented or stressed by lights. Where there are known migratory paths, habitats, and highly natural areas, even more care should be given to lighting choices and ensuring lights are used only when necessary." Policy DES 31 calls for us to "Develop an ordinance directed towards reducing light pollution." 

Additional improvements that building can take include using lighting with a warmer color temperature of 2700K or less, requiring lighting to be downward oriented to not illuminate clouds above the building, and the use of flashing anti-collision lighting.

The Cape Henry Audubon Society, in partnership with Dark Sky Virginia, the Friends of Indian River, and multiple other organizations, is leading the Hampton Roads Birds Safe/Lights Out initiative. This is part of a nationwide campaign now covering over 50 metropolitan areas from Boston to Miami to San Diego. 

Spring 2026 Campaign

The spring "Lights Out" campaign starts on March 15 in Hampton Roads.

As part of this voluntary program, the Cape Henry Audubon Soceity and its partners urge property managers, businesses, tenants, government agencies, and residents help to prevent night-time bird collisions with building by turning off and/or blocking as many external and internal building lights at workplaces as possible at night to help prevent injury and death of migrating birds, especially from 11 pm to sunrise.   

During migration, birds rest during the day and fly at night. During their long-distance flights, birds become disoriented by the bright, artificial lights of cities and are drawn into hazardous urban areas, where building collisions are a leading human cause of bird deaths, killing around 1 billion birds each year.   Learn how you can help at Bird Safe Hampton Roads. 

Please help by turning off lights visible outside after dark. Research conducted over 50 years by scientists at the Field Museum in Chicago quantified the bird-saving potential of turning lights out in downtown buildings. Halving lighted window areas decreased collision counts by 11 times in spring and 6 times in fall. Lights Out has secondary benefits in protecting moths, reducing light pollution, reducing energy costs for businesses, and reducing the region's overall carbon footprint.

If you want to learn more about the campaign or want to volunteer to help with outreach or monitoring, please e-mail us at capehenryaudubonsociety@gmail.com

Bird Safe/Lights Out Hampton Roads Year-End Report 2025

Our Bird Safe/Lights Out campaign has completed its second full year. We've seen some progress in our advocacy efforts to make buildings bird safe in Norfolk and around Hampton Roads. But we still recorded a fretful toll of dead and injured birds in our monitoring efforts in downtown Norfolk.

Outreach and Advocacy Accomplishments

• The renovation of McArthur Memorial Museum and administrative offices will include the installation of bird safe glass and DarkSky-compliant lighting.

• 

  Conservatory at Norfolk Botanical Garden

  The Norfolk Botanical Gardens' new conservatory is nearly finished! The entire structure is constructed of an ultraviolet-patterned bird safe glass with an etched dot pattern on the first surface of the glass. Once opened, the Garden staff has arranged for monitors to check the new conservatory for bird strikes as well as the older building in the garden. The Cape Henry Audubon Society has given two presentations on bird safety at the Gardens, one for the public and one to train the Gardens staff on monitoring best practices.
• The Norfolk Architectural Review Board is in the process of updating the Design Guidelines for the Historic District. The draft version includes a section on lights and migratory birds as well as DarkSky principles. We are grateful that they have been listening to our suggestions!

• 

  Norfolk City Hall

  The City of Norfolk has promised to apply a patterned film on the first-floor windows of City Hall and some of the windows on the first floor of Circuit Court facing the green space in 2025. Installation is still pending. Adding patterned film to skywalks connecting parking garages is planned for later this year.
• The new Norfolk Casino agreed to use downward-facing light fixtures on the first level of the building and bird safe glass on the first 40 feet up from grade level. However, this does not include the glass-fronted main entrance, which still poses a high risk for birds.
• The Norfolk Downtown Council continues to assist us in monitoring the downtown streets for dead and injured birds. We are very appreciative of their efforts.
• The City of Chesapeake included languages in its revised Comprehensive Plan recognizing that light and noise pollution impacts both humans and wildlife, including during bird migration seasons. It states that light pollution can be limited throughout the City by choosing exterior fixtures that are not brighter than necessary, are directed towards the ground, have full cut off, and use warm tones, among other practices.
• The Piedmont Bird Club has asked us for advice on starting a Lights Out campaign for Charlottesville. They hope to be up and running for spring migration.

Pending

• Added bird safe glass features to the Cuffee Aquatic Center, being built in Chesapeake, are still under consideration as part of design additions being negotiated with the contractor.
• The renovation of Chrysler Hall and Scope will begin later this year. We've urged Norfolk to budget for bird safe glass because we have observed that these two buildings are among the deadliest in downtown.

Monitoring

Northern Flickers
Photo by Kevin Lane

Overall, since we began monitoring downtown Norfolk on April 30, 2024, we have documented 727 dead or injured birds. In 2025, the monitoring team documented 78 dead or injured birds in the spring and 324 dead and injured birds during the fall migration. As a rule of thumb, we suspect that for every bird we find, there are 5 more dead birds that we don’t find because they were removed by scavengers or managed to fly away before succumbing to internal injuries.  

Just last fall, we recorded 26 American Woodcocks and 64 White-throated Sparrows as victims of window strikes. Sadly, we think that as flocks of sparrows settled in a particular location, such as Fountain Park at Commercial Place and Plume Street, Scope, and Chrysler Hall, one by one they hit the windows and died until most of the flock was wiped out. By mid-December, there were hardly any to be found in these locations. We speculate that the high number of dead woodcocks resulted from their local territory being disturbed by construction, forcing them fly through the city where they collided with windows. 

Dead birds delivered to Walters Lab at ODU for study