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Comment by matt_wulfeck | Hacker News Reader

Not that I don't think 6k birds isn't an unfortunate number, but even if we built 1,000 more of these power plants they'd only kill about 0.20% of the amount of birds killed by cats in the US every year [0].

[0] http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/01/29/cats-wi...

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And hundreds of millions ("Between 365 and 988 million"[0]) birds die annually from flying into buildings. There are organizations that encourage buildings to be built with bird friendly designs (especially when it comes to glass), though I've never seen much general interest in it.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/stop-...

Let's put scale into perspective here. One plant = 6000. millions of buildings = millions of birds.

I don't know what to think.

Some more scale: One 390MW plant = 300 thousand households

If your average bird-killing building uses less power than about 500 households, the power plant is still coming out ahead.

Indeed. This is non-story.

That alternative forms of power kill wildlife is regular talking point of the entrenched fossil fuel energy giants. As if coal fired power plants and oil fields are wildlife sanctuaries. I'd be interested in who is pulling the strings on this one at the LA Times.

The politicians they own also shameless love talking about those birds as well. And yes, fossil fuels kill several orders of magnitude more birds per year than renewables. Still, PV is a better source anyway.

This is not a non-story, at least for me. I didn't know about it and I find it interesting. Then again, I know 6000 is probably peanuts in comparision with, wild guess, birds and other species dying from cancer or other diseases because of the resulting smokes/particles/toxins released by burning stuff to get energy. Or maybe worse: whole species going extinct because their land is put under water to build a dam.

I dunno, I think it is a good bug report. Would be great to solve.

With the amount birds (and other small creatures) I find dead, dismembered and half eaten on my doorstep, I find it hard to believe that it's as much as 0.2% ... I only have 3 cats and one of them is a kitten, so I can't believe she's that effective yet. I've not had them very long. I'd wager if I bagged all of their kills I'd have 6,000 on my property alone by the end of the year. I'm one farm of hundreds in our area, many of whom probably have cats to keep the rodent population down.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that while it's unfortunate that this renewable power resource isn't completely benign as we'd like to believe, it must be a slow news day to be writing about the 6,000 birds a year it kills given its size. I imagine if you cordoned off an area of a similar size and threw in a couple of dozen cats in there, even with food and water, you'd chalk up similar numbers.

It would be more interesting to look at what kind of birds are killed.

May be a necessary evil

However then uniqueness of this is the concentrated location of the deaths. Solve it at one place and you prevent thousands.

Cats are everywhere

Ban cats and you solve it in one location. This does not happen in part because people don't really care that much about wild birds.

Ban cats and you still have feral cats. They eat birds because nobody's keeping them inside away from the wild birds.

Wild cats don't go after birds as much because they are looking for food not entertainment. Further wild cat density is fairly low outside of populated areas with endless supplies of mouse food.

is that true? Are birds not considered food for domestic cats? my own experience was that birds were caught and eaten.

It's not that they won't; it's that birds are harder to catch than things that can't fly.

You won't have feral cats for long if you hunt them like wolves and rats were hunted in the past.

Were we ever successful against rats?

$5 a cat skin would be in line with the solution that almost drove the bald eagle to extinction

Until people start breeding cats to get the reward.

It depends on what the birds are. The plant is on a migration pathway so vulnerable birds may be getting incinerated. Also, if it were attracting raptors, losses are a much bigger deal.

Kitty isn't killing falcons.

My mom's cat kills about 500 birds a year...

You are comparing an artificial man-made killing machine with natural predator. With your logic, one day robots will be able to justify killing their human overlords.

A little perspective is in order. The birds are not the "overlords" of the machinery.

Cats are usually a predator introduced by humans though, so they aren't exactly natural either.

Where is the natural predator in this comparison? Domestic cats are man-made as well - until very recently, the whole point of domesticated cats was to stand guard and murder varmints getting into your grain stockpiles, the more prolifically and efficiently the better.

House cats are not indigenous to the majority of the world and certainly not to North America. The robots comment doesn't follow.

Cats are indigenous to every continent save Antarctica. One of the most widespread, adaptable creatures in the world. Housecats are not genetically different from wild cats - they can interbreed and often do.

.. and Australia.

The native species that is closest would be the marsupial "cat" the Tiger Quoll.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_quoll

There was also the Tasmanian Tiger, aka thylacine but they're extinct.

Mountain lions and lynx are indigenous to North America, neither hunt songbirds. House cats are from the Near East.

Bobcat?

Yes, there's those too. Same group as the Lynx. But neither Lynx, Bobcat, nor Mountain Lion are decimating bird populations.

Hm. Cats come from the Fertile Crescent but that was 10,000 years ago. Since then they've gone everywhere. I wonder when they first came to North America? Was it just hundreds of years ago, or thousands?

Domestic cats come from the Fertile Crescent.

The animals they were domesticated from have been present in much of Africa, Asia and Europe for a couple million years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcat

Housecats likely came with sailing ships as onboard ratters (the same way they have come to many islands). Lynx, lion, etc are much older.

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