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Part-Night Street Lighting Did Not Restore Natural European Robin Song Timing

European robin in an urban London square
Conservation · Management

Switching streetlights off for the middle of the night did not restore natural daily song timing in European robins (Erithacus rubecula) in the Nantes metropolitan area of western France. The study, first published on 17 February 2026, compared robin vocal activity at unlit sites, sites with full-night lighting and sites where streetlights were switched off between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m.

Robins at both types of illuminated site began singing significantly earlier around dawn and during the morning than birds at unlit sites. At dusk they continued singing later. Across all three lighting treatments, vocal activity showed a strong dawn chorus about 40 minutes before sunrise and a smaller dusk chorus around 20 minutes after sunset. The researchers found no clear difference in the dawn, morning or dusk shifts between full-night lighting and part-night lighting, despite the latter providing several hours of darkness in the middle of the night. Nocturnal singing itself was sparse, so the study did not have enough data to test lighting effects during the early- and late-night periods.

Darkness in the middle of the night was not enough

Part-night lighting is increasingly used by municipalities to reduce energy use and the ecological effects of artificial light at night. The Nantes system examined in the study removes light during the core nighttime period but leaves short illuminated periods around evening and morning twilight.

The researchers had expected this schedule to move robin activity closer to that recorded at unlit sites. Instead, the daily singing pattern under part-night lighting remained much more similar to the pattern under full-night lighting. In the afternoon, song activity also tended to be later at part-night sites than at both fully lit and unlit sites.

The authors suggest that illumination around dawn and dusk, residual light from surrounding areas and lingering effects of nighttime light exposure may all contribute to the result. Their study therefore indicates that simply switching lights off during the middle of the night may not be sufficient when the ecological goal is to restore natural timing of activity in a twilight-active bird.

Sources and image credit

  1. Godet, L., Challéat, S., & Barré, K. (2026). Part-night lighting fails to restore natural song rhythms in urban European Robins. Environmental Pollution, 396, 127837. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2026.127837Primary peer-reviewed article with article date 17 February 2026. Passive acoustic monitoring in the Nantes metropolitan area compared European robin song timing at unlit, part-night-lit and full-night-lit sites.

Image: Charles J. Sharp — European robin (Erithacus rubecula) in Warwick Square, London, United Kingdom, 29 March 2014; representative urban species image, not a bird from the study. Source: Wikimedia Commons. · CC BY-SA 3.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ · Source

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