The numbers are trivial - in one study posted here, no more dead birds were found under wind turbines than anywhere else. And that would be in the single digits per area studied.
The truth is, birds are born to die. A bird has a nest of eggs - but the bird population is normally quite stable. So on average, nearly all new birds die by the end of the year. Cold, hunger, natural predation, disease.
Most bird protectionists on Germany are of the opinion that instead of barring wind turbines while citing birds as the reason, birds would be better served if for every wind turbine some amount of space would be dedicated to the protection of those birds.
Wind turbines are a (somewhat small) danger to a very specific subset of (bigger) birds, so this is essentially a plea to priorize the good of the bird population over the good of the individual bird.
Indeed. It's pretty much guaranteed that anyone bringing up wind turbines and birds is doing so to oppose wind turbines, not because they care about birds.
> A bird has a nest of eggs
However, this is the critical bit to bird populations - loss of habitat and nesting sites, as well as food during that time, and chemicals which can interfere with the success of this process (this is why DDT was banned).
At some point I saw a report on the actual numbers (was working in a big wind power company and a colleague was heading our research on this topic). One big take-away for me was that the number of bird fatalities due to windows in high-rise buildings was orders of magnitude larger than the number caused by wind turbines.
My school, 20+ years ago had a huge glass side (possibly still does) that at just the right time of day was utterly indistinguishable from the sky to the human eye.
I sat in many an assembly to the huge "thud" of birds flying into it at full speed. The school never did anything about it in the time I was there.
This was one school with some 20-30m wide windows, imagine just a single building with an order of magnitude more glass.
The glass balcony of the flat I used to live in caused issues for birds, I imagine glass is a much, much larger issue than wind turbines given its prevalence.
The problem is not small birds, it is big birds like eagles that can get 20 years old. For example in northern Germany wind turbines are the most common factor of death for them. Thus if just one blade needs to have a different color ot prevent collision and death then it is a pretty decent solution for a major problem.
That solves (or reduces) one (debatable) problem, but increases another (also debatable) one: anyone who considers wind turbines an eyesore and doesn't want to have them anywhere near will be even more likely to do that if their visibility is increased like proposed here...
“Estimates of up to a million or more birds a year are killed by turbines in the US but that is far exceeded by collisions with communications towers (6.5 million); power lines, (25 million); windows (up to 1 billion); and cats (1.3 to 4.0 billion) and those lost due to habitat loss, pollution and climate change”
The lack of nuance here is troubling and commits the fallacy that birds are a homogeneous population where one bird killed by wind turbines = one bird killed by a domestic cat.
From the paper's abstract: "The treatment had the largest effect on reduction of raptor fatalities; no white-tailed eagle carcasses were recorded after painting. Applying contrast painting to the rotor blades significantly reduced the collision risk for a range of birds."
A cursory Internet search reveals that raptors (and bats) are particularly vulnerable to wind turbines[0], and many raptor populations have been threatened for a long time due to a variety of threats and biology (they take longer to reproduce and recover).
And if one were to describe all the threats to birds listed here, they are basically iterations under the "loss of habitat" super-category.
Yes, power lines are also a big threat to raptor and other threatened avian populations, but wind turbines (and the power lines they use) are still being built, so reducing avian deaths from both sources seems worth researching and implementing. Especially when the parent article notes how little it would cost to paint the blades during manufacture (vs. post-installation).
Looks like this [1] is where you got that. Has a decent chart, and I think the last part of the paragraph is also interesting:
> Even if there were twenty times more wind turbines, enough to supply the US with electricity, the number of birds killed, assuming no improvement in wind turbine design, would be about 10 million--still far less than most other causes of bird deaths.
I suggest the link be changed to point directly to the open access paper ( https://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ece3.6592 ). The linked article adds nothing and, as Symbiote's comment points out, doesn't even include an image.
There used to be a bird called the 'Passenger Pigeon'. It "was once the most abundant bird in North America, numbering around 3 billion, and possibly up to 5 billion." It was hunted to extinction by 1901.
Glad to see people more concerned about bird populations. But, of course, that isn't why this wind-turbine meme is kept circulating.
A story that stood by me is the one of the lyre bird and the hunt to near extinction in the early 1900s for their impressive tail feathers. I cannot find the source on wikipedia anymore nor can I find these conservation efforts in a quick google search, but what stood by me is that 120 years ago people were also concerned about conservation of species.
Given that wind turbines are universally(?) white, I've always assumed it is to minimize heat absorption. If so, painting 1/3 of the blades black would increase heating of the painted blade, especially in lower latitudes (this study was done at high latitude in Norway). What's the side effect?
Also, this strategy will obviously have zero impact on bat deaths, given that a white blade and a black blade are identical to echolocation at night. Curtailment of turbines in low wind condition - which is when bats are able to fly, and when turbines produce the least amount of energy - is the proven way to minimize bat deaths. But wind farms want to maximize energy production (profit), so are not fond of curtailment as a strategy.
The blades are made of composite materials that involve some sort of epoxy binder. So heat would be important to avoid. Composite aircraft are white for that reason.
Ultrasonic deterrents have been experimented with, and have shown reduction in bat kills, but there are many challenges with respect to efficiency and reliability. Technically, ultrasound is attenuated significantly in the atmosphere, so it takes a lot of amplification to broadcast ultrasound significant distances. Not to mention that the bats are often flying with the wind, not against it, which means the ultrasonic transducers are projecting into the wind. Certain signals and sample playbacks might be effective for one bat species, say Hoary Bats, but not deter another species like Red Bats.
Detecting bats' echolocation calls, however, is much easier. A brilliant researcher in Arcata CA has a working system installed in a commercial wind farm which detects the presence of migratory bats, and brakes the wind turbines until no bat calls have been detected for some some period of time. Bats don't fly all night, and migrating bats may travel together.
We were actually prevented by the USFWS from performing winter hibernacula counts for fear that we humans might spread Covid to bats, whose immune system practically shuts down during hibernation, until it was determined that this isn't possible.
Besides, the bats which are primarily killed by wind turbines are not cave-roosting bats, but high-flying tree bats. Bats either have a strategy of hibernation or migration, and it is these larger migratory tree bats which fall prey to turbines.
Echo-reflective surfaces wouldn't make a difference. Bats aren't killed by colliding with turbine blades, they are killed by barotrauma when flying NEAR the high-velocity low-pressure turbine blades when they try to investigate the large, moving, novel objects. I repeat, the most effective way to prevent bat deaths at wind farms is to curtail (brake) turbine blades during low-wind conditions; a 25-gram bat doesn't fly in high winds, and turbines are least efficient in low winds.
Source: I perform bat echolocation surveys, including on wind farm sites.
In South Texas we have bat colonies under freeway overpasses, and trust me, bats are not a source of disease concern here beyond "don't mess with them even if injured".
Unfortunately, a paint job may not save vultures from collisions [1]. I learned of this from Ed Yong's new book, "An Immense World".
> Vultures have such large blind spots in their visual field that they cannot see objects directly in front of them when they fly. This discovery explains why vultures frequently collide with conspicuous structures such as wind turbines and power lines, despite having some of the sharpest eyes of any animal.
Ptarmigans are fat ground-dwelling birds related to grouse and chickens. They would probably collide with the broad side of a barn. I can't imagine they spend much time flying, especially not flying high or far, but apparently they're known to migrate up to 100 miles.
Readit News
The truth is, birds are born to die. A bird has a nest of eggs - but the bird population is normally quite stable. So on average, nearly all new birds die by the end of the year. Cold, hunger, natural predation, disease.
This is a solution looking for a problem.
Wind turbines are a (somewhat small) danger to a very specific subset of (bigger) birds, so this is essentially a plea to priorize the good of the bird population over the good of the individual bird.
> A bird has a nest of eggs
However, this is the critical bit to bird populations - loss of habitat and nesting sites, as well as food during that time, and chemicals which can interfere with the success of this process (this is why DDT was banned).
I sat in many an assembly to the huge "thud" of birds flying into it at full speed. The school never did anything about it in the time I was there.
This was one school with some 20-30m wide windows, imagine just a single building with an order of magnitude more glass.
The glass balcony of the flat I used to live in caused issues for birds, I imagine glass is a much, much larger issue than wind turbines given its prevalence.
From the paper's abstract: "The treatment had the largest effect on reduction of raptor fatalities; no white-tailed eagle carcasses were recorded after painting. Applying contrast painting to the rotor blades significantly reduced the collision risk for a range of birds."
A cursory Internet search reveals that raptors (and bats) are particularly vulnerable to wind turbines[0], and many raptor populations have been threatened for a long time due to a variety of threats and biology (they take longer to reproduce and recover).
And if one were to describe all the threats to birds listed here, they are basically iterations under the "loss of habitat" super-category.
Yes, power lines are also a big threat to raptor and other threatened avian populations, but wind turbines (and the power lines they use) are still being built, so reducing avian deaths from both sources seems worth researching and implementing. Especially when the parent article notes how little it would cost to paint the blades during manufacture (vs. post-installation).
[0] https://abcbirds.org/wind-energy-threatens-birds/
> Even if there were twenty times more wind turbines, enough to supply the US with electricity, the number of birds killed, assuming no improvement in wind turbine design, would be about 10 million--still far less than most other causes of bird deaths.
[1] https://www.sierraclub.org/michigan/wind-turbines-and-birds-...
Glad to see people more concerned about bird populations. But, of course, that isn't why this wind-turbine meme is kept circulating.
Also, this strategy will obviously have zero impact on bat deaths, given that a white blade and a black blade are identical to echolocation at night. Curtailment of turbines in low wind condition - which is when bats are able to fly, and when turbines produce the least amount of energy - is the proven way to minimize bat deaths. But wind farms want to maximize energy production (profit), so are not fond of curtailment as a strategy.
I wonder if something similar would work for bats (and maybe birds too)?
But then again I'm dubious about their efficacy for kangaroos. It would be worth investigating though.
Detecting bats' echolocation calls, however, is much easier. A brilliant researcher in Arcata CA has a working system installed in a commercial wind farm which detects the presence of migratory bats, and brakes the wind turbines until no bat calls have been detected for some some period of time. Bats don't fly all night, and migrating bats may travel together.
Plus I agree bats have worth, but these guys carry crazy amounts of diseases like cough cough Covid-19 cough.
We were actually prevented by the USFWS from performing winter hibernacula counts for fear that we humans might spread Covid to bats, whose immune system practically shuts down during hibernation, until it was determined that this isn't possible.
Besides, the bats which are primarily killed by wind turbines are not cave-roosting bats, but high-flying tree bats. Bats either have a strategy of hibernation or migration, and it is these larger migratory tree bats which fall prey to turbines.
Echo-reflective surfaces wouldn't make a difference. Bats aren't killed by colliding with turbine blades, they are killed by barotrauma when flying NEAR the high-velocity low-pressure turbine blades when they try to investigate the large, moving, novel objects. I repeat, the most effective way to prevent bat deaths at wind farms is to curtail (brake) turbine blades during low-wind conditions; a 25-gram bat doesn't fly in high winds, and turbines are least efficient in low winds.
Source: I perform bat echolocation surveys, including on wind farm sites.
In South Texas we have bat colonies under freeway overpasses, and trust me, bats are not a source of disease concern here beyond "don't mess with them even if injured".
Putting them on the coast could generate power from sun, tide, and wind.
You’re in for a world of hurt.
> Vultures have such large blind spots in their visual field that they cannot see objects directly in front of them when they fly. This discovery explains why vultures frequently collide with conspicuous structures such as wind turbines and power lines, despite having some of the sharpest eyes of any animal.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.10214
That certainly says more about ptarmigans than turbines.
What is wrong with these birds
Ptarmigans are fat ground-dwelling birds related to grouse and chickens. They would probably collide with the broad side of a barn. I can't imagine they spend much time flying, especially not flying high or far, but apparently they're known to migrate up to 100 miles.