Number One Threat to Birds. Hint – it’s not Wind Turbines.
March 22, 2011
Thufferin' thuckatath...
While public attention has focused on wind turbines as a menace to birds, a new study shows that a far greater threat may be posed by a more familiar antagonist: the pet house cat.
A new study in The Journal of Ornithology on the mortality of baby gray catbirds in the Washington suburbs found that cats were the No. 1 killer in the area, by a large margin.
Nearly 80 percent of the birds were killed by predators, and cats were responsible for 47 percent of those deaths, according to the researchers, from the Smithsonian Institution and Towson University in Maryland. Death rates were particularly high in neighborhoods with large cat populations.
This is, of course, more confirmation of what my own research for a pair of wind energy videos showed.
(I’ve embedded them below the fold)
The article gives the number of birds killed annually by wind turbines as 440,000 (I assume that’s in the US? That’s a much higher number than the National Academy of Sciences study from 2007 that is quoted in the videos. Maybe it’s a global number?) The prediction is for a million bird deaths annually by 2030, as the number of turbines grows.
Anyhow, the number of deaths from housecats? 500 million.
Add to that the the billions more that die from collisions with buildings, wires, cars, not to mention loss of habitat from suburban sprawl, agriculture, and activities like coal mining, the occasional massive oil spill, and of course, the gorilla in the room, climate change, and you can see that Turbines are not the problem – they are indeed part of the solution.
The second video also deals with the problem of bat mortality, which is real, but manageable.
Climate Denial Crock of the Week 
November 20, 2016 at 11:41 pm
As with any crooked, anti-environmental enterprise, you can be sure that bird deaths are under-reported. Who has the ability to collect all those corpses on sites that range for thousands of acres? Get real. Many or most birds will surely be carried off by scavengers before people ever find them, especially industry grunts trying to downplay the deaths.
Furthermore, the bird species killed by wind turbines are going to be different ones in many cases; following migratory routes far from cities.
“The second video also deals with the problem of bat mortality, which is real, but manageable.”
According to who? What sort of “green” enterprise would treat mass carnage so casually? It has the ring of lies about it.
https://www.google.com/search?q=wind+turbines+bat+mortality (those numbers are all false, you say?)
The industry and its devious supporters fail to admit that more wind turbines will mean more deaths, and more wind turbines are essential to the industry’s master plan. You can’t just point to a snapshot in time, run a (flawed) body count and say it’s a done deal, when the industry wants at least ten times the number of eyesores we’re blessed with today.
The image of Big Wind is based on the idea that it’s an honest business just because it’s not Big Oil or Big Coal. You can’t just say that and make it so. The constant lack of respect for scenery is anything but green on the outside, so the internal machinations are unlikely to be green, either.
http://cutt.us/blightfornaught