June 11, 2007

Backyard massacre

It's the time of year when little birds are trying out their wings, cascading out of the trees and hopping about, unable to get back into their nests. Not such a bad rite of passage, were it not for the neighborhood house cats. . . .

Which brought to mind this recent post on the latest attempt to sabotage wind power, which cynically cloaks itself in the mantle of environmentalism -- to wit, bird protection. Yet even if the number of wind turbines were increased a hundredfold, the appended statistics indicate that the added bird deaths would be negligible when the total human impact on bird life (cats included) is taken into consideration.

Posted by David on June 11, 2007 8:41 AM

Comments

Hi, Dave,

An issue of the journal Nature which discusses the recent report by the National Academy of Sciences (based on 14 good-quality studies) on the environmental effects of windpower projects (Emma Marris and Daemon Fairless, “Wind farms' deadly reputation hard to shift,” Nature Vol. 447, Issue No. 7141 (10 May 2007), p.126), notes that “the average death toll attributable to an average wind turbine” is 3% of a bird per year (!) — that is, “it takes 30-odd turbines to reach kill rate of one bird a year.”

Michael McNeil

Posted by: Michael McNeil (Impearls) [TypeKey Profile Page] on June 20, 2007 12:15 AM
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