If you're looking for somewhere to go birding this Halloween season, consider a cemetery. Cemeteries are often quiet, lightly disturbed spaces that host mature trees and other plantings. They are widely recognized as urban refuges for biodiversity and great birding locations (just be sure to show proper etiquette). In England, some also celebrate and protect nearby bats, like the Bats in Churches Project which estimates that up to 90% of historic English churches have protected bat roosts in their voids and crevices.
A recent study of cemetery headstones looked at several cemeteries in southwestern Virginia, comparing sections filled with old-fashioned upright markers of varying sizes and shapes — obelisks, crosses, pillars, statuary — against sections with the uniformly flat, ground-level markers that have become standard since the mid-twentieth century. The researcher counted birds and followed some individual Eastern Bluebirds, Northern Mockingbirds, American Robins, and European Starlings, logging their behavior and the structures they touched. In those areas with upright markers, the perching hunters (bluebirds and mockingbirds), made excellent use of upright headstones and other structures as hunting platforms. Keeping upright grave markers benefits these birds since an old, low, bare, and unobstructed gravestone makes an excellent bird perch.