Advocacy Accomplishments
Bird-safe glass installed along the glass railway at World Trade Center's Liberty Park. This bird-safe measure was implemented in part due to pressure from NYC Audubon volunteers who were finding many dead birds that had collided with the reflective glass. Photo: NYC Audubon
For over 40 years, NYC Audubon has been a leader in bird and habitat conservation in New York City’s five boroughs. Our successful initiatives include the “Buffer the Bay'' program to preserve priority lands around Jamaica Bay as well as the conservation of the grasslands of Brooklyn’s Floyd Bennett Field, the Harbor Heron islands, and Goethal’s Bridge Pond on Staten Island. Recently, we've secured important policy wins with the implementation of Lights Out legislation and the nation’s strongest bird-friendly building laws. Despite these accomplishments, there is still much more work to be done to protect the birds and habitats of New York City.
Artificial nighttime lighting (here, in Manhattan’s World Trade Center area) attracts night-migrating birds, causing them to stray from their natural migration paths. The birds then may become disoriented and collide with glass windows, either at night or in the morning. Photo: alpe89/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Lights Out (2021)
In 2021, NYC Audubon and other members of the Lights Out Coalition celebrated the New York City Council’s unanimous passage of Lights Out bills Int. 274 and Int. 271, an important step towards signifantly reducing artificial light pollution in New York City harmful to migrating birds.
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Local Law 15 requires new buildings and major retrofits in New York City to use bird-friendly materials, such as the Feather Friendly® tape recently installed by 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge. Photo: Katherine Chen
Bird-Friendly Materials Bill (Local Law 15)
In December 2019, New York City Council passed the bird-friendly materials bill, Initiative 1482-2019. Now Local Law 15, the initiative was (and still is) the most comprehensive bird-friendly building legislation passed in the U.S. to date.
The Javits Center's one-acre rooftop farm, managed by Brooklyn Grange, grows up to 50 crops each season. Photo credit: Dustin Partridge
Green Roof Tax Abatement
NYC Audubon played a crucial role in passing new and improved green roof tax abatement that prioritizes vulnerable areas in New York City. The bill will help spur the creation of green roofs, an important type of green infrastructure that helps combat climate change while providing habitat for birds and urban green space for people.
Great and Snowy Egrets, Double-crested Cormorants, and a Great Blue Heron gather in Jamaica Bay. Photo: Don Riepe
Protecting Jamaica Bay
The preservation and restoration of New York City’s largest wetland, Jamaica Bay, has been a principal focus of NYC Audubon’s habitat work over the past 40 years. Our work has been aimed at safeguarding this important ecosystem, which provides habitat for over 325 species of birds.
The Central Park Ramble offers visitors an experience of the woods in the center of New York. Photo credit: Cornelis Verwaal
Protecting The Ramble
The Central Park Ramble’s important woodland habitat could have been destroyed if not for the efforts of NYC Audubon’s earliest members, who founded New York City Audubon in 1979 in part to bolster their efforts to successfully oppose a plan to remove trees in the Ramble, which would have fundamentally altered this beloved spot for birds and people.
