This news is for the fake greens. Greenwashers Those who push an elitist agenda to the detriment of everything else. Including bird populations. I’ve written on this topic previously. Thinking about all these articles that suggest AGW is killing birds. Such as 'warming temperatures" via carbon.... (which isn’t proven) The reality is the god awful monstrosities known as wind turbines are killing birds on a mass scale. That’s demonstrable. Provable. Well documented.Notice from the article linked above blaming AGW we see this?
“Species that depend on high-elevation forest habitat, long-distance migrants, and coastal breeders are most at risk from climate change”
EuronewsLong Distance migrators and coastal breeders- both types of species are greatly harmed by wind turbines- but let’s just gloss over that fact, ok, phony greens?! Migratory birds with a giant wind turbine stuck in the middle of their migration pathsI'm a huge fan of birds.
But all that clean, renewable energy comes with a high cost to the nation's wildlife. Researchers estimate that 140,000 to 328,000 birds are killed every year in collisions with the turbines' spinning rotor blades and support towers. The risk to birds is highest at night, when the blades and towers are cloaked in darkness.
Is it clean, green, earth loving energy if it results in mass bird killing? That estimate is 140,000 to 328,000 dead birds every year. Year after year. Using a medium of 250,000 and to my mind that's low balling the figures. That tells us roughly one million birds would die in 4 years. Two and a half million birds in 10 years. For so called ‘clean green’ earth friendly renewable energyMassive numbers
On any given night during the peak of the spring migration — from the end of April to the beginning of May — up to 520 million migrating birds are on the wing, says Dr. Kyle Horton of Cornell's famed ornithology lab and one of the researchers involved in the project.
Wing Severed by a Wind TurbineAccording to keepers, a wind turbine near the Altamont Pass severed a portion of this 14-year-old golden eagle\'s left wing in 2000, leaving him unable to fly or survive in the wild.Now researchers at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, have hit upon what could prove to be a simple way to protect birds from wind turbines. They've used the "signatures" of birds that are visible in raw weather radar data to generate bird maps and live migration forecasts designed to alert wind farm operators to the presence of birds at peak times.
Most are small birds at risk from predators. (Big birds tend to migrate in daylight, although they too sometimes fall afoul of the turbines.)
In other words, since large birds, like the golden eagle shown above will not show up on radar they have zero chance of being saved via this idea
"Our measures are dominated by small songbirds, things like warblers and tanagers, thrushes and grosbeaks — those are the dominant signatures we're getting," says Horton.It's long been known that migrating birds are easily detected by the Doppler radar systems used to monitor rainfall in the U.S.
This plan is limited to large flocks of birds. (Not eagles, hawks etc.,) The plan is dependent on wind turbine operators actually HEEDING the information and either stopping or slowing their wind turbines to save the birds- Think they’ll do this? Will it cut into their profits? Answer that question and you’ll know the answer. Fake greens need not think about the reality of this situation and all these bird deaths.
For weather forecasting purposes, of course, the radar signals caused by bird flocks are filtered out. But the Cornell researchers, including Horton and Benjamin Van Doren, a zoologist who recently moved to Oxford University in the U.K., realized that birds' nighttime flights could be used to generate real-time maps that could help save birds' lives.After working for several years to integrate the signals from a network of weather radar systems across the U.S., the scientists a few weeks ago started posting automated bird migration forecasts and real-time tracking maps at the lab's website, BirdCast.info.Van Doren and Horton hope wind farm operators will heed the forecasts and maps — which are drawn from 143 weather radar systems across the country — and stop or slow their wind turbines temporarily when large numbers of birds are flying through the area.
One solution to the bird-strike problem might be to raise the turbines' so-called "cut-in speed." That's the wind speed above which it makes economic sense to run the turbines. Wind turbines operate more efficiently at the high wind speeds, Horton says, while birds tend to avoid flying on windy nights."If we're getting large pulses of [migrating birds] coming through on a handful of nights, then altering their strategies for just, say, five nights versus doing nothing, then it may have a big impact," he says of wind farm operators.The bird migration maps could also make it possible to switch off some of the lights on tall buildings and communication towers at peak times. The lights on such structures are known to confuse birds flying at night, and result in many fatal collisions, according to Horton.
Given the short period of time that the maps and forecasts have been online, it's too soon to tell whether they're having a beneficial impact. But the researchers are hoping for good results. Says Horton, "We really want to see some conservation come out of this, hopefully to reduce some of the mortality."
Large cities, with excessively tall buildings, also kill lots of birds... Like in TorontoBut the street cleaner can clean them up before anybody really sees them. Which is another issue the phony greens gloss over- building taller buildings to pack more people into, factory human farming style, present many issues that go ignored. Image from Gary- Taken at Leslie Spit, Toronto
