Canada Ranks Top Bird Killers, Wind Turbines Not Even Close To The Top

This article is about debunking myths (deliberately perpetrated) regarding wind energy. First, watch the video:


Billion dollar businesses and billion dollar interests have a lot of money they can use to attack their up-and-coming competitors. Even if those competitors are driven by clear thinking and clean energy, money directed in an effective way can make them look bad. Promoting misinformation lacks integrity, but it’s very common within large industries and economic sectors.

People are busy. They do not have the time to research each myth out there. Thus, we sometimes get fooled. Here at CleanTechnica, we try to make it a bit easier to get some straight-up, correct information. Greed-driven myths hurt the world, and our #1 goal is simply to help the world.


I came upon this bird directly in front of the door of my local library. The bird hit the glass of the library door and died. Yes, 3rd on the list of things that cause birds to die, is collisions with buildings.

Peter Sinclair provides us with The List of Top Bird Killers (via CBC):

1. Domestic and feral cats: 200 million
2. Power lines, collisions and electrocutions: 25 million
3. Collisions with houses or buildings: 25 million
4. Vehicle collisions: 14 million
5. Game bird hunting: 5 million
6. Agricultural pesticides 2.7 million
7. Agricultural mowing: 2.2 million young birds, equivalent to one million adult birds
8. Commercial forestry: 1.4 million nests, equivalent to 900,000 adult birds
9. Communications towers: 220,000


A resource that cannot be depleted or sacrificed is wind. Wind is not toxic (unless it carries pesticides, that is). Wind cuts global warming pollution. Wind turbines use much, much less water than fossil fuel power plants, nuclear power plants, and even solar power plants. Wind does not use slave labor to produce it. (If I am wrong about this, please comment and let us know.)

Another Peter, Peter Singer also communicates change and generates extraordinary vibrations of thought considering humanitarian value systems. Central reasoning of Peter Singer is bestowed as follows: “If we can prevent something bad without sacrificing anything of comparable significance, we ought to do it.”

Wind power doesn’t even make the list above. Wind turbines have been increasingly improved in a way as to minimize bird deaths. We need wind power, and it’s nice to know that it’s not the big bird killer it’s made out to be. For sure, there is room for improvement, but there almost always is, and that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use the best, cleanest, safest options we have.

Chimp_Logic wrote on Nov 1^st, 2013 at 7:51pm:

muso wrote on Oct 31^st, 2013 at 9:32pm:


The club of rome are the high priests of anthropogenic global warming, for forty years they have been working to pass carbon pricing on a global scale.

They will also get a fair chunk of the revenue through there various organisations.

Now if you look at their ideology muso, it will most certainly change your life style if the environmental movement implements all its agendas.

Denial is futile you will be assimilated....LOL....!!!!!!

Ajax wrote on Nov 2^nd, 2013 at 11:45am:
Of course, of course. It's all a conspiracy; aaaall a conspiracy. 

I remember attending a spill of cyanide in the NT about 10 years ago. There was a puddle at the side of the road and about 120 dead budgerigars. On the way there, the ute struck a flock of budgerigars. I thnk that one trip alone took out 10 of them.

[... continued]

For discussion sake, let's add the 67 eagle deaths a year at Altamont Pass to the 85 the study confirmed. Over a 15-and-a-half-year period, that would amount to 1,124 dead eagles. That sounds like a lot. But how does that compare with overall non-natural eagle deaths?

When an eagle is killed and people find a carcass, FWS asks them to send it to the National Wildlife Property Repository near Denver. About 2,500 show up every year, according to FWS, although certainly more go unreported. Using that number as a benchmark, the number of dead eagles annually from 1997 through June 2012 would amount to approximately 38,750 birds. Based on these admittedly crude estimations, at least 97 percent of the eagle deaths were attributable to causes other than commercial, land-based wind turbines. Often FWS can't determine the exact cause of death, but apparently poachers, transmission lines, pesticides, and lead poisoning from bullet-ridden carrion killed significantly more than turbines.

Same Old Same Old

FWS is currently investigating 18 wind industry-related bird-death cases and has referred seven of them to the Justice Department. Even so, as Bryce constantly complains, the Obama administration has yet to prosecute a wind developer under the two main federal bird protection laws, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) and the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act (Eagle Act). Both the Eagle Act and the MBTA, which covers more than 800 bird species, prohibit anyone from "taking"-- hunting, capturing, selling or killing -- a bird without a permit.

As Bryce acknowledges, however, no previous Justice Department -- not even under the fossil fuel-friendly George W. Bush administration -- ever took a wind developer to court for violating either bird law. Building and communications tower owners also have been spared. Meanwhile, federal prosecution of the oil and gas industry and pesticide applicators goes back to the 1970s, and the government brought its first case against an electric utility for electrocuting birds in 1998. So perhaps there's a better explanation for the way the laws have been applied than what Bryce calls an Obama administration double standard.

The MBTA, which was enacted in 1918, is a strict liability law. That means if you accidentally kill a migratory bird with your car, for example, or a bird slams into your living room picture window, technically you have committed a misdemeanor, despite the fact it was unintentional. But it's impractical to enforce the law that way. The Justice Department will consider legal action only if a violator repeatedly breaks the law and is in a position to take reasonable steps to prevent further harm. Oil and gas companies can easily prevent birds from dying in their waste pits by stretching nets over them. Electric utilities can insulate their transmission poles to prevent electrocutions. But it is much more difficult to remediate skyscrapers or communication towers -- or wind turbines, for that matter -- once they are in place.

Unlike the MBTA, the Eagle Act, which was enacted in 1940, doesn't protect eagles from lawful activities that kill them unintentionally. It only applies to individuals or corporations without a permit that "knowingly, or with wanton disregard for the consequences" take a bald or golden eagle. That makes it much more difficult for the government to prosecute violators than under the MBTA.

Prosecution as a Last Resort

With either law, prosecution is a last resort. FWS -- which has only 230 field agents monitoring wildlife deaths nationwide -- tries to work with violators to fix the problem before it refers a case to the Justice Department.

For example, for decades FWS inspectors have been routinely checking for bird carcasses in oil and gas company liquid waste pits, which kill as many as a million birds annually. When FWS agents discover dead birds, they generally notify the responsible company and give it the opportunity to rectify the problem by installing netting or screening to keep birds from landing on the pits. If the company pays a modest fine--usually $500 and an additional $250 per bird--and corrects the problem, FWS will not file a case with a U.S. Attorney's office. That happens only after repeated violations. And even if a company is ultimately convicted and put on probation, the fine is relatively small.

Bryce actually cited one of these cases involving repeat offenders as evidence that the Obama administration is "aggressively" prosecuting the oil and gas industry, but he left out some key information that would have undermined his argument.

In 2011, FWS filed criminal charges against three companies drilling in North Dakota's Bakken shale formation. "One of those companies, Continental Resources, was indicted for killing a single bird" that died in one of its waste pits, Bryce squawked in the Wall Street Journal in February and again in the National Review in May.

[continued ...]

However bats are different.

'More than 600,000 bats were killed by wind energy turbines in 2012, a serious blow to creatures who pollinate crops and help control flying insects, according to a new study from the University of Colorado Denver.

“The development and expansion of wind energy facilities is a key threat to bat populations in North America,” said study author Mark Hayes, PhD, research associate in integrated biology at CU Denver.  “Dead bats are being found underneath wind turbines across North America. The estimate of bat fatalities is probably conservative.”

The study, which analyzed data on the number of dead bats found at wind turbine sites, will be published next week in the journal BioScience.'

extract: 3w's.ucdenver.edu/about/newsroom/newsreleases/Pages/Study-shows-wind-turbines-ki
lled-600000-bats-last-year.aspx