Previous work to quantify bird attraction to urban ALAN has been limited in spatial and temporal scales. One study investigated the effects of the 9/11 Memorial Tribute Lights in New York City on the behaviors of nocturnally migrating birds, finding that the annual event over seven years influenced the migration of 1.1 million birds (Van Doren et al., 2017). On the other hand, La Sorte et al. studied migration patterns across the northeast using satellite imagery to infer light levels and citizen science data to infer bird counts - while large in spatial scope, their study was limited in resolution. For example, light level "pixels" from the satellite data covered 3.3km2 each (La Sorte et al., 2017).
More quantitative approaches to evaluate artificial light emissions at night have been performed in an urban context by Dobler et al., who utilized ALAN emissions from buildings in the New York City skyline to measure aggregate human behavior based on the identification of on/off light transitions. Patterns of light intensity and sudden shifts in average brightness of a building could be discerned with these methods. It was found that while individual building lighting behavior is somewhat random on a nightly basis, the "pulse" of the urban environment is much more periodic in its aggregate behavior (Dobler et al., 2015).  The goal of this work is to determine if a similar pulse is present in bird counts over time and if that is geospatially and temporally correlated to the lighting variability.