ABOVE: FIDEL FERNANDO, UNSPLASH
As darkness fell over Manhattan on the ninth anniversary of the September 11 attack, two beams were shot into the sky at the site where the Twin Towers once stood. The commemorative lights had appeared annually since the towers fell, but in 2010 onlookers noticed something unusual: countless white sparkles glittering within the white beams.
The mysterious white objects turned out to be thousands of migrating birds. Although the public had just taken notice of this spectacle, conservationists had been aware of the phenomenon for several years. Shortly after the tribute first appeared, New York City Audubon, a conservation group, helped initiate a program to monitor the installation and temporarily shut off the lights whenever too many birds got caught in the beams. In a later analysis of the bird populations on memorial nights between 2008 and 2016, researchers found that, although the short-term shutdowns were ...
