How to Light Up Your Garden Without Disturbing Wildlife

Outdoor lighting is a fun way to elevate your garden aesthetic, illuminate key landscape features, create a welcoming ambiance for evening gatherings, and, most importantly, provide security. Your garden is an essential part of your home, and well-installed lighting enhances the atmosphere of outdoor spaces, illuminating paths and entryways for easy navigation. However, your garden is also home to many amazing critters and wildlife. If used incorrectly, even the best lights can become a source of light pollution and pose a serious threat to local wildlife. Therefore, it's crucial to install wildlife-friendly lights and ensure your neighbors and wildlife feel comfortable and safe without any negative impacts.

In this guide, we'll show you how to illuminate your garden without harming local wildlife or disrupting natural habitats.

How Incorrect Lighting Leaves a damaging effect on wildlife

Outdoor landscape lights at night can impact your local wildlife in numerous ways, such as affecting navigation, breeding, physiology, and general health. Bright uplights installed to highlight tall features, such as evergreen trees and buildings, can significantly impact on the natural environment for wildlife, including insects, birds, and nocturnal animals like hedgehogs, raccoons, and opossums, which can find these lights disruptive.

Some of the recognized lighting effects on wildlife include:

• Outdoor lights can disrupt the circadian rhythm of diurnal and nocturnal wildlife, causing them to wake and sleep at the wrong times, which can upset their hunting or feeding time.
• Many bat species avoid light areas, while some use them to hunt insects, but this can expose them to predation. Bat species are affected in their roosting, navigating, foraging, and migrating behaviors due to outdoor lights.
• Flood lights may temporarily blind or attract some animals, just like frogs.
• Light pollution affects the breeding success of glow worms, contributing to their decline.
• Light sources can disorient moths and nighttime-flying migrating birds, resulting in energy loss, higher predation risk, and decreased efficiency as nocturnal pollinators.
• Garden birds are also disturbed from sleep by artificial lighting, which extends their activity period. This results in them eating more, singing in the middle of the night before dawn, and depleting their energy.
• Outdoor lighting can also act as a barrier for some species, dividing habitats, while for others, lighting is highly attractive, so it can become a sink for hundreds of insects each night.

What Gardeners Should Do to Minimize this Impact

If you want to protect wildlife and the environment while still maintaining lighting for safety, consider these simple yet effective actions. These guidelines help you create a welcoming haven for your wildlife friends and make a difference.

1. Use Warm, Soft, and Low-Intensity Lights

The color and intensity of your lights make a huge difference to wildlife. Choose warmer-colored and low-intensity lighting. The best colors for your landscape lights are warm white, amber, yellow, or red, like candlelight.

Bright white and blue lights can be harmful to nocturnal animals. Therefore, it is recommended to use warmer lights with an intensity of under 3000K on the Kelvin scale, which is less disruptive. The higher the Kelvin, the bluer and whiter the light. High Kelvin lights, such as security lights, resemble daylight, which may confuse animals.

2. Use Dimmers

Like using warm tone lights, install dimmers to adjust the brightness of your garden lighting. This will create a wildlife-friendly environment in your backyard without compromising on security or ambience. Bright light is considered harmful because it unbalances the food chain. It can make prey visible to predators and vice versa.

By reducing the intensity of your lights, you can create a safer habitat for nocturnal fauna while also saving energy and extending the lifespan of your lights.

3. Angle Light Sources Downward

Spotlights, uplights, and unshielded lights can be the most harmful lights to use in the garden. They are intense, sending a glare into the sky, disturbing wildlife, and contributing to light pollution.

Use downward-facing, shielded lighting and position the lights as low as possible, aiming to direct their focus to areas that need it. When adjusting the angle of lights, consider how they will affect your neighbors, such as not glaring directly into windows, and position them carefully.

4. Avoid Upward Light Spill

When installing a fixture, ensure it has low glare and minimal upward light spill. Upward and sideways light spilling contributes to skyglow and habitat disruption. For a wall uplight, check its upward light output ratio (ULOR). It is the percentage of light that is released above the horizontal plane. For dark sky zones, the ULOR should be less than 0.5% or 50 lumens.

If you use uplights, ensure the light is directed and contained within the area being illuminated. For this, select the appropriate beam angle that directs the light in one direction.

5. Turn Off Unnecessary Lights

This simplest step is one of the most effective ones to reduce light pollution and protect the ecosystem. Turn off floodlights, porch lights, and other garden lights when not in use. This will benefit wildlife friends and save energy. Constant lighting all night is unnecessary in most areas and increases ecological harm.

6. Install Low-level Path Lighting

Install low-level path lights, step lights, and spotlights to light the way and help visitors navigate safely at night. Avoid using harsh and intense lights. Another friendly wildlife protection tip is to keep some areas of your landscape dark, without any lights, to provide safe havens for wildlife and to create balance with brighter areas that are used frequently.

7. Opt for Solar-powered Lights

If you want to enjoy a soft light in your garden at night, consider installing soft solar-powered lights with a warm glow or growing native plants that attract fireflies. These natural alternatives add charm to your garden without harming wildlife.

Solar lights are the best type of outdoor lighting for wildlife. They use low-Kelvin LEDs instead of bright white light. Best of all, they are dimmer, which is perfect for local wildlife.

8. Install Fully Shielded or Dark Sky-friendly Lights

Dark sky lighting fixtures are completely shielded. They prevent light from glaring into the sky and contribute to light pollution. Unshielded lights travel into the sky and disrupt wildlife. Shielded and dark sky lights are designed to control where the light is directed, so that it shines only where needed. This will ensure that your garden lights don't illuminate all over the place and disturb wildlife's circadian rhythm.

Amber light and dark skylights complement each other well. Together, they reduce blue light emissions. For example, you may notice that many dark sky street lights produce a warm amber color instead of white.

9. Use Timers on Outdoor Lights

You can reduce unnecessary lighting usage and save energy by installing a lighting fixture with a timer function. Cutting down on how long your bulbs are left on will save you money and reduce the impact on wildlife.

With a timer, you won't have to worry about forgetting to turn off lights when you don't need them. Timers ensure that lights turn off during peak hours of wildlife activity.

10. Use Motion Sensors or Motion-activated Lights

Motion-activated lights are not only energy-efficient, but they also have a lower environmental impact than leaving outside lights on for extended periods. They lift the responsibility off your back by turning off the security lights for you instead of keeping them on all night.

Select a variation that allows you to adjust the settings, enabling you to control the duration of the light's stays on. These lights do not run for very long, so you'll have reduced energy bills and a better environment.

The Bottom Line

Outdoor lighting is the best way to get the most out of your outdoor space. It is essential to ensure that your lighting is balanced, controlled, properly installed, and shielded, so that it is directed only where needed.

Light pollution from improperly positioned lighting can harm our environment and wildlife. Reducing light pollution is just another way to help protect and support our diverse ecosystem. By taking precautions and making small adjustments to your lighting habits, you can create a safer and natural environment for our wildlife friends.

DripWorks offers wildlife-friendly, specialized lighting solutions that create the perfect ambiance both for people enjoying the outdoor space and the wildlife that lives there. Whether you need lighting for a residential or commercial landscape, our wide range of landscape lighting solutions can help you create lighting schemes that protect biodiversity and brighten up your space.