This author has no idea what they are talking about- we have extremely high quality data on bird kills from wind farms. Teams of wildlife biologists literally walk the farms everyday identifying kills, and they have other teams that plant fake kills as experimental controls, to accurately quantify exactly the rate that kills are missed, and correct for that. This whole process is required by law, and there are a lot of wildlife biologists that do this work. You cannot operate a wind farm without quantifying its impact on protected species.
It's annoying that there's interest in these stats mainly as an argument against renewable energy, not from perspective of wildlife preservation. Just those particular birds are precious, not the others killed by other man-made structures, pollution, and habitats destroyed by expansion of agriculture.
I'd like to see not just more precise numbers of birds lost to wind energy, but the environmental and societal costs of not having the wind energy. Fuel extraction and processing has its environmental impact too. Lack of affordable energy (fuel poverty) costs human lives too. How many human lives are harmed to save a bird from a windmill?
For folks at home thinking about their windows: Apparently one issue is that windows may mirror the outside environment to birds, appearing as portals to more open-space and trees, especially if you include ultraviolet light which humans can't see and which the glass wasn't designed to pass-through.
So there are a variety of products advertised for home usage that stick to the outside of the window to make it appear more like a barrier, often semi-transparent to us but more-opaque in ultraviolet to birds.
UniverseHacker ·9 days ago
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pornel ·9 days ago
I'd like to see not just more precise numbers of birds lost to wind energy, but the environmental and societal costs of not having the wind energy. Fuel extraction and processing has its environmental impact too. Lack of affordable energy (fuel poverty) costs human lives too. How many human lives are harmed to save a bird from a windmill?
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loopz ·9 days ago
Think how many birds crash during a year, and how many houses and buildings with windows there are.
You can also buy bird stickers to put up.
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Terr_ ·11 days ago
So there are a variety of products advertised for home usage that stick to the outside of the window to make it appear more like a barrier, often semi-transparent to us but more-opaque in ultraviolet to birds.
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keeptrying ·9 days ago
Furrows the brow of my wife up quite a bit.
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