SHOULD WIND AND SOLAR FACILITIES BE CLOSED BECAUSE THEY KILL BIRDS?

Last month I are posted on:

     HOW IMPORTANT ARE BIRDS?

In summary, I reported:

• There may be up to 400 billion birds on Planet Earth.
• In the U.S. alone:
• Cats kill half a billion birds/year.
• Glass windows:  almost a billion
• Traffic:  100 million
• Electrical transmission lines:  around 174 million
• Agricuture:  67 million
• Wind turbines kill around 250.000, or 0.050% as efficiently as cats.
• If some day wind power increases by a factor of ten, that would equal 2.5% of cat kills.
• If some day solar farms produce as much as electricity as wind farms, all those facilities would amount to 10% of cat kills.
• Should we eliminate cats from our society?  There are 74 million to 96 million cats as pets in the U.S., and 70-80 million dogs.  Dogs aren't as capable as cats in reference to birds.
• Fossil fuel power plants kill ten times more efficiently than wind farms.
• Windows and buildings kill tens times more birds than cats.  We certainly won't stop using windows nor constructing buildings.

Well, Susan Kraemer of Renewable Energy News just reported:

• There are 5 billion small passerines (song birds) in North America.
• Somewhat fewer than a quarter million passerines collide annually with wind turbines in the USA and Canada.  
• This is about 0.01% of the population of passerines.

• 30% of passerines (right) annually die of natural causes.
• However, the size of windmills has changed from the faster-turning small kW turbines of the 19080's to the 1-3 MW turbines of today, which are out of the hunting range of raptors, but lower than the migration corridor of small passerines.
• Bird kills have accumulated from the earlier days.  Latest studies show less of an effect on birds.

However, two of the three comments to that article indicated:

• The study was paid for by the American Wind Energy Association, which is a clearly biased organization.
• Raptors (right--eagles, hawks, etc.) do get killed by wind turbines, and their reproduction rates are much lower than passerines.

So, maybe this issue will continue to hinder solar and wind farm development.

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