By Lisa Gonzalez, VP & Executive Director, National Audubon Society, Audubon Texas
As we sit on our porches and patios before the summer is here to stay, one of nature’s most impressive spectacles has been happening right over our heads. Spring migration fills the skies with billions of birds migrating to their summer breeding areas in northern latitudes where they find plentiful food and nesting habitat.
Unfortunately, millions of birds die every year from human-related activities, a fact that underscores the need to protect these critical wildlife populations and bend the bird curve of declining populations. There’s far more to be done to ensure birds continue to thrive in our state — especially related to energy infrastructure and sustainability planning. While bird conservation and energy issues may seem completely unrelated, these topics deserve to go hand-in-hand, particularly where I sit in Houston, the energy capital of the world.
Texas is encompassed by the Central and Mississippi Flyways, the hemispheric migratory routes stretching from the Arctic tundra into South America. As migrating birds fly through, we’re keenly aware of the need to help them along their journey. For the National Audubon Society and partners in Texas, this includes our Lights Out Texas campaign, which encourages businesses and families to turn off their outdoor lights during migration, making nighttime navigation easier for our feathered friends. Light reduction decreases the risk of building collisions and death for many birds migrating through our communities.
As the second most deadly city for birds migrating through the United States, Houston is in a prime position to take these conservation measures even further. In the last 50 years alone 3 billion birds have been lost due to human impacts, with hundreds of North American bird species vulnerable to the increasing change in climate. The Bayou City knows firsthand the effects of these changes with our frequent extreme weather events. And these events don’t just affect our communities and families, they also have negative impacts on birds and their habitats.
Our state’s over-reliance on traditional energy resources accelerates the effects of a changing climate. As a clean energy leader, Texas has demonstrated a commitment to cutting carbon emissions. State leaders should prioritize expanding our state’s clean energy portfolio — with resources that work in tandem with traditional energy generation — to facilitate decarbonization, bolster our grid, and minimize the disparate impacts of the status quo.
National Audubon Society recently released a report that underscores the need for states to take a more deliberate approach towards transmission infrastructure siting. The report found that billions of birds die due to human-related causes every year, and encounters with electricity infrastructure account for a significant portion of these deaths. While this statistic is startling, it also demonstrates the opportunity Texas leaders have to improve our infrastructure in service of environmental sustainability.
I think often about the Golden-cheeked Warbler, an endangered bird species which only nests in Texas. During the 2023 regular legislative session, we successfully advocated for the preservation of the Warbler’s nesting habitat — an effort that felt especially meaningful after the species was sighted at Dogwood Audubon Center near Dallas for the first time in nearly two decades.
I share my concern for the impacts our energy infrastructure has on birds from the same perspective. If we care about the resilience of Houston and aim to bend the bird curve for the betterment of future bird populations, we must work to ensure our infrastructure and public policies prioritize these critical conservation issues. Otherwise, we risk further harming bird populations that we can’t survive without. That’s too big a risk to take with our new energy economy and our futures.
