Every September 11th, twin blue beams rise from
lower Manhattan and climb towards the heavens, in solemn yet stirring tribute
to those killed in the 2001 terrorist attacks. This near-sacred, one-day-a-year
observance of those lost in the worst foreign attack on American soil in the
nation’s long history may be in jeopardy if the authors of a recently published
study are heeded.
The
study, published in the Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences (look for the centerfold!), examined seven
years of the annual tributes at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum
and concluded that the lights are a potentially
fatal attraction to migrating birds. Not outside the realm of possibility, but
what is undeniably true is that the twin towers so honored were demonstrably a fatal attraction to
Islamic terrorists…and their roughly 3,000 victims.
Study
researchers claim that thousands of birds were drawn to the lights, causing
them to waste precious energy circling and risking collisions with buildings or
capture by predators. Well, those in Manhattan are certainly familiar with
objects in flight colliding with buildings. Oh, and are these birds risking
“capture” by airborne predators? If
so, why are these predators not at
risk because of the lights? Or are they and we just don’t care about them?
Could we negotiate for the “captured” birds release?
The
study’s authors recommend that the memorial’s twin blue beams be forever
dimmed, and that bright lights around homes, stadiums, offshore oil rigs, and
construction sites be turned off during migration season.
There’s
no circling around the fact that, if authorities implement these researcher’s
recommendations, our world will be a little darker.
And,
any way you look at it, that decision would be for the birds.
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