This author has no idea what they are talking about- we have extremely high quality data on bird kills from wind farms. Teams of wildlife biologists literally walk the farms everyday identifying kills, and they have other teams that plant fake kills as experimental controls, to accurately quantify exactly the rate that kills are missed, and correct for that. This whole process is required by law, and there are a lot of wildlife biologists that do this work. You cannot operate a wind farm without quantifying its impact on protected species.
It's annoying that there's interest in these stats mainly as an argument against renewable energy, not from perspective of wildlife preservation. Just those particular birds are precious, not the others killed by other man-made structures, pollution, and habitats destroyed by expansion of agriculture.
I'd like to see not just more precise numbers of birds lost to wind energy, but the environmental and societal costs of not having the wind energy. Fuel extraction and processing has its environmental impact too. Lack of affordable energy (fuel poverty) costs human lives too. How many human lives are harmed to save a bird from a windmill?
We simply put up post it stickers where birds usually crashed in our windows. There's way less crashes and dead birds after that.
Think how many birds crash during a year, and how many houses and buildings with windows there are.
You can also buy bird stickers to put up.
Harder to do with one of those glassy skyscrapers. the ugliest and probably the deadliest for birds kind
What is hard about it? They rope themselves everywhere around it to clean it up. Even a basic robot can put stickers. An even easier and cheaper way is to require it for new constructions.
I have to leave my windows dirty so the damn birds stop smacking into it.
Furrows the brow of my wife up quite a bit.
you can also put (bird) stickers on them, so they see the window and they avoid it
Bird stickers unfortunately don't work, birds don't recognize them. Something like "anti collision dot stickers" will work though if the spacing between the dots is not larger than recommended.
Bird eyes are more sensitive to UV light than humans right? Better UV reflective coating would help them?
Or a transparent film with a pattern of absorbed and reflected UV?
The window has too nice a view to ruin unfortunately.
For folks at home thinking about their windows: Apparently one issue is that windows may mirror the outside environment to birds, appearing as portals to more open-space and trees, especially if you include ultraviolet light which humans can't see and which the glass wasn't designed to pass-through.
So there are a variety of products advertised for home usage that stick to the outside of the window to make it appear more like a barrier, often semi-transparent to us but more-opaque in ultraviolet to birds.
Simpler solution.
Simply not cleaning them.
No more birdie bam then, because they see immediately what's ahead.
No more dread about smashed beaks, brains and broken wings.
Birdie sings, joy it brings!
With apologies to Roald Dahl (The Twits):
That evening, the Roly-Poly Bird flew round and round The Big Red House singing out,
"There's sticky dirt stuff all over the pane!
If you fly at the surface, you'll damage your brain!
So fly away! Fly away! Do not crash!
Or you'll finish up tomorrow in a cold Bird Mash!"I used to work in an upper floor of a suburban office park "mirrored-window" building.
Every day, we'd have bloody smears on the glass.
Earth at Night in Colour S01E05 touches on this.
The subtitle is revealing:
[We don't know how much birds kill the windmills so] "This makes it a weak argument against windmills"
"We don't know how much, so it may not happen, or is not so relevant as we think, but is repeated by ideology", is a nasty trick. Nice smoke curtain. Specially when is joined later with:
"it is true that all humanmade structures are technically bird killers, but..."
Either it happens, or it does not happen.
We aren't talking here about a sparrow crashing against a window. What we do know is that carcasses of big raptors, vultures, storks, other birds, and even bats can be found near the windmills basis often, in a distribution that is not aleatory.
Even if we never achieve to calculate an exact value (before the corpses are quietly removed by foxes or companies) we can identify that there is a problem here. As predators are scarce (by definition) and some are endangered, the impact on populations is not negligible.
Killing endangered species is illegal. It does not matter If is "just one" or "just a few" eagles.
So we ban cars?
So top 3 killers are cats, windows and cars and it doesn’t help if cats only kill small birds and mammals because they basically kill the food of the larger birds.
Don’t forget tire wear and all the other sources of pollution that endangers any living being.
And add climate change.
So why are wind turbines singled out?
> So why are wind turbines singled out?
Because some people hate the looks of wind turbines, they believe it lowers their property value. To pretend that this is about the birds is absurd, because if it was these same people would target cats as well and they are not doing that and never did.
People can be amazingly stupid. Some people in my area wanted to prevent the construction of wind turbines as it would destroy the view of the nearby fjord. They strategically forgot to mention that the turbines would be replacing a coal fired power plant (and the open air coal storage). The view is already destroyed, if anything the turbines will actually let you see the fjord and make room for a huge nature area around them.
There might also be a group of people working in the fossil fuel industry who fear that wind turbines are taking their jobs.
What makes you think turbines are singled out?!
There’s no point to ban them altogether neither the cats or cars. Consider a range if options between total ban and total unregulation. Thing about traffic code.
The biologists that took of look at it probably already have propositions like putting them outside of the narrowest migratory corridors or ways to be visible to birds as stickers does on German windows.
Because we are building wind turbines when there are far better alternatives such as nuclear. We’re also being sold that “wind is better for the environment” when it’s not.
You will notice that the same people who are against wind turbines are frequently also oppose to nuclear power (and cell tower, highways, factories, farms, forests, high rise building, schools, railroads, new neighbourhoods, pretty much any change that is not to their immediate benefit.
In many cases nuclear is a better option, but if you want to stand up a few gigawatts of power in two - five years, turbines will let you do that. There's no chance of getting a nuclear power plant operating in a country with no history of nuclear power in less than ten year, and that's perhaps being fairly optimistic. Wind is better than running coal 24/7, which is what you competing against in most cases.
We‘re also being sold nuclear is better.
Nuclear power plants take a long to build and are expensive in power production and maintenance. Just look at France in the hot summers.
And that doesn’t include the danger of sabotage and terrorism.
Didn’t read anything about the fear of russian rockets hitting Ukrainian wind turbines.
Nuclear power plants are also a SPF. In insecure times decentralization is better.
Counting the carcasses is a very flawed analysis. In cities you rarely find far less carcasses of raptors, vultures and storks. In your analysis this would lead you to making a larger built environment is a good measure to save endangered species. It would even be illegal not to do so.
Is true that we should keep in mind that there is an implicit "at least" 150 eagles killed by just one company. Plus all the other bird species. This value is a minimum estimation.
Several scientific studies calculate than between 234,000 and 573,093 birds on average are killed by year in USA by windmills. Big and small species. Data points that bats suffer even more than birds. (See Smallwood. 2010. The Journal of the wildlife management 71, issue 8 for example).
> Killing endangered species is illegal. It does not matter If is "just one" or "just a few" eagles.
Well, yes it actually does, legally at least.
Also, if a bird kills itself, that isn’t illegal. Even if members of it’s species consistently does it on your particular window.
> Killing endangered species is illegal. It does not matter If is "just one" or "just a few" eagles.
Great logic! Let's ban skyscrapers and any windows that do not pass through UV. Use one in your house? Illegal.
But the biggest fallacy in this PR stunt is that outrageous "we don't know, nothing to see here":
Windmill company ESI Energy LLC, guilty of killing 150 bald and golden eagles in 8 USA states [1][2]
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/wind-energy-company-ple...
[2] https://www.justice.gov/usao-edca/pr/esi-energy-llc-wholly-o...
> Use one in your house? Illegal
I'm curious, how much bald eagles crashed against your house windows lately?
> we don't know, nothing to see here
> ESI Energy LLC, guilty of killing 150 eagles
> how much bald eagles crashed against your house?
We dont know the statistical extend but we can measure very accurately in smaller areas especially large and endangered birds.
This is why (in my country) you have to study the local bird population before you get your permission to build your windmills. Something ESI should have done, even if we perfectly knew the statistics of all birds killed by windmills globally.
But what about migrating birds?
We have them around here. In fact, there’s even a Facebook page for a local nesting pair. They mostly eat eels, so water pollution is their worst enemy.
The thing that often gets raptors, is rat poison. It also kills cats. Rats seem to thrive, no matter what we throw at them.
It’s generally a good idea to keep cats indoors. I read a statistic that outdoor cats live dramatically shorter lives than indoor ones.
Have you looked at the Highways?
And we are talking about skyscrapers not simply houses.
> Windmill company ESI Energy LLC, guilty of killing 150 bald and golden eagles in 8 USA states [1][2]
Read the case. They were guilty of basically not getting a permit. If they got a permit their incidental kills can be thousand+ per project. They are a "least concern" category.
> But the biggest fallacy in this PR stunt is that outrageous "we don't know, nothing to see here"
The fallacy is saying this is a concern while not having measurements showing it is a bigger concern than other things like illegal shooting or lead poison or rat poison or power lines or skyscraper windows. If the windmill fighters actually care about birds maybe they could fund these studies. Do they fund these bird studies or just don't want wind energy for whatever reason (like investing into fossil fuels)? If they fund those bird studies why don't we have the measurements.
Meanwhile there are no permits for killing eagles with rat poison (every death is illegal but who's counting?). Meanwhile every power line operator is given unlimited permit for incidental bald eagle kills. But yes wind turbines, the big enemy of bird lovers.
Deep learning to the rescue ...
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But it seems that the principal objection to these counts is that birds don't necessarily die on impact but may travel quite far before succumbing to their injuries, so the counts necessarily result in an underestimate of the true effect. Are you saying the area that's surveyed is large enough that this isn't true?
I’m certain these studies are able to estimate those other deaths and consider factors beyond just carcasses on the ground, because I am personally close to a biologist that works on this, but I don’t know exactly how they do it. The author here seems to be incorrectly extrapolating research statements on static buildings to windmills, when the latter is much more researched.
That seems like something very far from a certainty. Imagine if you were to cite this in a scientific paper: "a close friend of mine does this but I have no idea how they do it". What about this [1]:
> We show that the use of the ORNIS 1%, the 5% mortality criterion, and potential biological removal criteria are inadequate for providing safe thresholds with respect to the impact of wind turbine collisions on populations.
From a paper entitled "Mortality limits used in wind energy impact assessment underestimate impacts of wind farms on bird populations".
1. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.6360
I do not doubt that people deeply understand the current state of the art, and that they understand those limitaitons. I am 100% in agreement.
But the fact that they understand the limitations and capabilities in their work has no bearing on the effectiveness of their work when it comes to the specific goal of protecting bird populations. (One does not logically imply the other.)
After a couple years of data collection, is it still necessary? If we scale up wind farms into thousands, I can’t imagine how many people we’d pay to look for dead birds. Or eventually this will be a drone company