(engine roaring) (birds whistling) - [Narrator] The National Park Service has lots of employees working in the field.

Some protect wildlife, some protect landscapes.

Ashley Pipkin's job is to protect the darkness.

- All right, good to go.

I need to be up there so none of the features of the beauty blocking the view of the camera.

You get into the job so you can hike and see all the landscaping when we get to the top we'll have a really good view.

Okay, we're here.

- Ashley is a researcher for the Natural Sounds and Night Skies Division of the National Park Service.

Her job is to answer a question.

Just how dark does it get out here?

We're going to use a camera to take 360 degree view images to assess how light pollution might be impacting our ability to see the night skies.

(vehicles driving) - [Narrator[ As cities grow and the world's population increases, scientists have noticed that all this light is killing more than just our ability to see the stars.

- All wildlife, all people, all plants, every biological organism spends half their life in darkness and half their life in daylight.

And so there's lots of impacts to wildlife breeding patterns.

Plants are really sensitive to artificial light as well.

So all of these things depend on natural darkness.

- [Narrator] To document how light pollution is impacting our national parks, Ashley works the late shift.

Standing watch with her cameras through the night in some of the wildest places in America.

- I have this really bizarre schedule where I have to reserve the dark time.

So the time when the moon is not in the sky, okay?

I never have to bring a rain jacket 'cause if its cold I'm not working.

- [Narrator] As the last glimmers of daylight disappear over Lava Beds National Monument, just south of the Oregon border, a celestial tapestry unfolds that our earliest ancestors would have recognized.

- All right, we're gonna point the camera towards the North Star.

(grumbling) It's really great to look up and see the Milky Way that's like a galaxy we're in a galaxy.

Sometimes on a really dark night, you can see Andromeda and nearest neighbor with your naked eye.

Open this puppy up.

- [Narrator] But even here there are distractions.

The town of Tooley league is a relentless flicker on the horizon.

That orange glow you see at the bottom left of your screen, that's Klamath Falls over 40 miles away.

Ashley's software works with the camera to measure both types of light and the brightness of the light across the landscape.

It's a way to document how much artificial light is intruding into this dark corner of the country.

- National Parks are refuges for the night skies.

So we take these images with the camera and look for light pollution along horizon.

- [Narrator] In a worst case scenario, it looks like this.

Light pollution in cities like San Francisco read like a smear of red and orange and yellow.

What Ashley found here at Lava Beds was a more subtle change over 10 years.

She found about a two and a half percent increase in light pollution in certain areas visible from the monument.

But still, it's pretty dark.

- This is really exciting.

We know exactly where we were, we can go back here 100 years, 50 years from now and see how things have changed.

- [Narrator] Look at the globe today.

And you can see how artificial light has transformed the earth since the first light bulb was patented in 1892.

(slow music) The consequences of this kind of light pollution are not just aesthetic.

- [Reporter] A bizarre scene in Uptown hundreds of birds lying on the ground after crashing into the NASCAR Hall of Fame building.

Several died and many more were injured.

- [Narrator] Most birds migrate with the help of the stars to guide them.

Artificial light can lure birds in causing them to crash into Windows.

Others Lured in by light, may find refuge in the evening.

Only to wake in the morning faced with navigating or hunting in an unfamiliar landscape of glass and reflections.

Mary Coolidge sees over 300 bird strikes a year at the Portland Audubon wildlife Care Center.

- So we have a sub adult traption hawk here that was brought in not quite a week ago by somebody who witnessed it hit the window.

It was really down when it came in, it was showing signs of severe neurological trauma.

It looks like it is still suffering from impaired vision in the left eye, which would actually be a death sentence for this bird.

It would not be releasable into the wild because it would so severely impair its ability to hunt.

- [Narrator] Audubon was treating several birds from window strikes on the day we visited.

And this is just one facility in one city, in one morning.

- We know that there are up to a billion window collisions in the United States alone every year.

So, this is a very serious issue and light pollution is definitely one of the contributing factors.

- [Ashley] Biological systems evolved on a planet for four and a half billion years that didn't have any artificial light on it.

They were evolving under circumstances of bright days and dark nights.

And we've changed all that really just in the last hundred and 30 years or so since we started lighting up our nights on a global scale by putting electric street lighting out.

And now what's happening is that we really don't have those same day night cycles that we're used to have, which interrupts circadian rhythms in all kinds of species.

I could be on a theater stage right now, I'm utterly blinded.

You can't see anything beyond all of that lighting.

- [Narrator] This kind of bright unshielded light cast the glow up into the sky where it isn't needed, and where it interferes with bird migration.

But examples of poor lighting design are everywhere in Portland.

- Look at this storage place, that lighting I mean, there's nobody in there right.

So a couple of billboards lit from the bottom up.

One easy solution to lighting them like this and throwing all that light up into the sky is to light them from the top down.

- [Narrator] There are reasons for light of course, simple illumination, art, or for safety.

But even new advances in lighting designed to make our lives better, are creating unintended consequences.

Portland's Tilikum crossing has artful colored lighting that changes with river conditions, but it also has energy efficient streetlights that emit a bright bluish white light of a color and intensity that increases light pollution.

- There are places on this bridge where the lighting actually measures 25 foot candles, which is fully five times the recommended standard across the nation for pedestrian travel.

- [Narrator] It's so brightly lit, that you can hardly see the moon between the towers of the bridge.

On the other hand, Portland Firestation 21 shows that things can be different.

This building's lighting was intentionally designed to minimize potential impacts with birds migrating along the river.

- And so some of the things they did here was make sure that all of the exterior lighting was well shielded.

So we have recessed lights, that point down and not lighting will all be off by 10pm.

- [Narrator] An urban art features like the Earth Mother, use downward lighting, reducing the sky glow.

- It's a fine line.

We absolutely wanna see a curbing of unnecessary lighting at night.

And we also live in cities at night and we want people to be excited about being outside at night and vibrant city scapes.

(murmuring) - [Tourist] Oh yeah.

- [Narrator] For some people though, the need for darkness true darkness is so primal they'll drive hours just to experience it.

At Plier in Arts and Science Residency in the high desert community of summer lake, guests share in the first annual dark skies gathering poetry, music and stargazing.

- We haven't seen the Milky Way in a very long time.

It's the skies that I remember from when I was a very young child.

- I think there's just a joy that comes with simply laying on the earth and looking up.

- [Narrator] The idea for this event was Chelsea Peil's.

- The hushed tones with the darkness, I think they just go together.

It's something about sort of being in this space of something bigger than you tends to quiet your voice.

- [Narrator] Call it dark skies tourism.

- There's art, there's culture, their storytelling and I just wanted to bring that to the fore.

(slow guitar music) - Here are lights, we need darkness to see.

Here is kind of cleansing, distance has frozen into beauty.

- With more people connecting to the stories of the stars, we might have a better chance of saving the last dark places.

- [Narrator] It's this kind of connection that may help turn the tide on what has been an unchecked increase in light pollution, planet wide.

- We didn't realize what we're losing.

We're losing the ability to be inspired by the night sky.

But we are also moving further and further away from being our natural selves and interacting with the landscape ourselves.

- How lovely is that?

- We didn't notice for a long time, but I think we've gotten to a point where we've realized what we're losing.