Lights out for the fledglings: one tiny island goes completely dark so baby seabirds can find the sea

Every autumn, the roughly 450 people of Corvo — the smallest island in Portugal's Azores — switch off every public light for five nights. The darkness is for the Cory's shearwaters: after three months in their nests, the young birds make their first flight to the ocean guided by starlight, and streetlamps fatally scramble that instinct, sending dazzled fledglings crashing into the village's narrow streets. So since 2019 the island has staged a full blackout of public lighting — still the only island that does it in full — while volunteers like Leonardo Xavier, still out searching at nearly 2 a.m., gather the fallen chicks into cardboard boxes for the night and release them from a clifftop the next day. The wider rescue campaign counts about 6,000 fledglings saved on Corvo alone since 2015, and more than 30,000 across the Azores.

SDG 15 · Life on land — Mechanism: community action