Guardian · 6 hours ago

Lights out: the Island That Goes Dark to Save Young Seabirds – in Pictures | Oceans | the Guardian

Every autumn, the 450 residents of Corvo Island in the Azores make an unusual choice: they turn off their lights. For five nights, the smallest island in Portugal's archipelago goes dark so that young Cory's shearwaters - navigating by starlight on their first flight to the ocean - aren't drawn off course by the artificial glow of streetlamps and killed on cobblestone streets. What began in the early 1990s as neighbors quietly roaming the village to rescue fallen birds has grown into a movement that has saved more than 30,000 fledglings across the Azores since 2015. Marine biologist Tania Pipa, who travels to Corvo each year to monitor the birds, puts it simply: "To me, the day I don't hear Cory's shearwaters in the Azores, it will certainly not be the Azores." There is something quietly radical in a community choosing, night after night, to dim itself so that another creature can find its way home.