You answered a question regarding windmills and weather patterns. I heard from a scientist friend of mine that windmills are terrible for migrating birds. How bad is that problem? Are windmills going to create more problems than they fix, by killing off bird species?
apparently, it was more of a problem with older designs. Eco response here.
It’s about time we finished the job the Cretaceous meteorite started: fucking flying dinosaurs!
I assume the O.P. is referring to this column:
You know what’s bad for birds? Cats.
It’s hard to find good numbers, since many websites have an agenda, but the American Bird Conservancy site says cats kill hundreds of millions of birds per year in the US. By comparison, they attribute 440,000 deaths to windmills, and project 1 million per year if windmills increased to produce 20 percent of the US electricity. (Presumably they’re assuming careful placement and advancements in preventing windmill bird deaths, like in Procrustus’s link, in the later number.) Now they’re not unbiased, but I’d at least expect those numbers to be biased in the same direction.
For another take, this site claims windmills actually lead to fewer bird deaths, compared with other sources. They’re not unbiased either, but their point that you’d have to look at the net difference in bird deaths is valid.
I won’t dispute that some birds are killed by flying into a windmill but that’s true about all structures. Some people seem to think windmills are spinning around at high speeds like whirling death propellers. But here’s a video of one actually in operation.
And here’s a video of a whirling death propeller :).
But yes: cats, power lines, windows, cars, and a few other sources utterly dominate the bird death tally. See here for a chart.
Number of birds I’ve witnessed killed by a windmill: 0
Number of birds I’ve witnessed killed by a pane of glass: 5
Windmills are bad for bats, however, and I doubt cats exert a lot of pressure on bat populations, so the effect is proportionately more pronounced. And bat populations are under a lot of stress right now.
Property taxes are going up and there’s been talk of lay-offs.
So, the lesson I should take away is we need to develop wind turbines that kill more cats, thereby protecting bird populations.
Did I get that right?
Depends upon where the bats live. When I was growing up, someone moved bats into our neighborhood to help fight insects. Our cat was particularly devestating to that population. One summer I would regularly come out in the morning to 2 or 3 fresh dead bats on the porch. Thanks.
Well, that and they can’t keep their noses clean.
Keep in mind the relative size of a typical wind turbine, which can be over 100 meters in diameter; in that video, I count 2.5 revolutions in 11 seconds, which means that the tips of the blades are moving at 71.4 meters/second if it is 100 meters across (circumference 314 meters). That’s 160 mph, and 80 mph at half the blade length. Oh yeah, the blades alone can weigh dozens of tons, so getting hit by one is much worse than getting hit by a car. Although the blades are still moving relatively slowly and don’t cover much area, which helps prevent impacts.
My Wikipedia link above contains this assertion, as well:
I’m tying pieces of strings to the end of my windmill propellers right away.
I don’t know much about biology or animal rights but is the number of birds killed even meaningful? Is it more important to measure the impact of windmills on the sustainability of the population? If the populations remain healthy then aside from poor little birdy does it matter much?
Some managed fisheries kill milions of fish yet the populations are not in danger. Same with hunting certain animals.
So aside from pure numbers are windmills bad for healthy bird populations?
Raptors (i.e. large birds) are at risk because their breeding rates are lower. They’re also at greater risk from power lines because they are large enough to bridge between lines and cause a short. One particular wind farm was a risk because it rested in a valley along a condor migration corridor, so it poses a larger risk to that population than wind farms in general.