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Comment by ihunter2839 | Hacker News Reader

From what I understand, one of the big bird issues with turbines is that birds of prey like hawks, eagles, and falcons don't generally look forward but down as they scout for prey, and thus are likely to fly into turbine blades. I believe some turbines have cameras systems to detect birds in the vicinity of the blades and either make a noise to alert the bird or maybe even bring the turbine to a halt. This is really only an issue for large scale installations though, obviously wouldn't apply to low lying roof installations.

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The bearded vulture is one of Europe's largest birds, it rarely comes to The Netherlands, living mainly in Spain and France. When it does comes to The Netherlands, about once every 3 years, it'll be a national news item as it's quite a spectacular bird. Last year one came, and not a week later it was found dead under a wind turbine.

That bird is not just a statistic, it was the single bird of one particular species in our country, and it flew into one of the few wind turbines we have.

I'm 100% for wind turbines, I think it's a magnificent sight every time I cross the afsluitdijk seeing them rise from the mists providing us with clean future proof energy. But the sort of stupidity that drives an engineer to say only 1 in 10000 bird deaths is due to wind turbines, without asking why or how or what bird is going to be the end of us all one day.

>afsluitdijk

Apparently this is a real place, not a slamming keyboard word.

Afsluit = "close off". Dijk = "dike" (pronounced the same too). It's a 20 mile long dike we've built that closes off what used to be the South Sea from the North Sea, turning it into a big lake that's called the IJsselmeer.

IJ is pronounced ei isn't it? The wonder of Nederlandse Taal..

I had to do the same slow down and re-read that, as it looks a lot like a username I've used when slamming keys for a Zoom meeting.

It's all the QWERTY home-row letters making it look that way, I think. Does look a lot like a quick slam of the fingers on the keyboard to generate a "random" string.

maybe using qwerty is closer to Dvorak in that locale

Wait until you look up Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch

wow, I thought you were joking

And now for the grand reveal of someone pronouncing it! https://youtu.be/fHxO0UdpoxM

https://xkcd.com/1053/

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

On this particular vulture (my apologies for looking the way the story is told makes it sound like one of the "They can’t have cows feed under those because it, it causes some kind of birth defects. This is what my sister who has cattle was telling me." ( https://www.marketplace.org/shows/how-we-survive/white-gold/... ))...

Yes, this is a real story. https://4vultures.org/blog/necropsy-results-shed-light-on-th...

> With certain bird populations like the Bearded Vulture growing, birds can disperse in unusual habitats, and it is critical to find solutions to mitigate such threats. Operators need to develop shut down on demand processes and be willing to cooperate with conservationists to avoid accidents and help save birds. Furthermore, wind farms should implement mitigation measures to help prevent collisions such as equipping deterrent devices and even painting a single wind turbine blade black as a recent study suggests, however, more research is necessary to determine the effectiveness of this anti-collision measure. To safeguard biodiversity, conservationist should work alongside the energy sector to find solutions and prevent such accidents.

There are systems that do this. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkart/2018/06/07/system-can-...

> Now comes research in the journal Biological Conservation on an automated system that scans the skies and can turn off a windmill if a bald or golden eagle is headed toward a deadly collision. Researchers from The Peregrine Fund, Western EcoSystems Technology and American Wind Wildlife Institute used human observers and photographs to see how well the camera-based monitoring system called IdentiFlight could detect, classify and track birds.

> The IdentiFlight system detected 96% of birds detected by observers and 562% more birds than observers. It's not perfect; the system misclassified nine of 149 eagles, for a false negative rate of 6%., with a false positive rate of 28% for misclassifying 278 of 1,013 eagles. Birds were classified as eagles by the system at a median distance of 793 meters (about a half a mile), and detected and classified in less than half a second.

The paper is at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000632071...

Statistically, something that kills 1 in 10000 birds will occasionally kill the only bird of a species in a country.

True. About 50.000 birds die due to windmills per year in The Netherlands, so according to this stat we should have 500M birds. So the odds of it killing a specific bird is roughly 50.000/500M=0.01% chance. So we'd expect it to happen once every 10.000 years. Guess we got unlucky last year..

But the statistics can also be deceiving if presented like that, just like you said if people don’t stop and think about which specific birds they kill.

For example let’s say windmills kill 100,000 birds a year and let’s say that is 0.1% of all birds. That looks acceptable. Well 90,000 of those might be seagulls and represent perhaps 1% of seagulls and 9,000 might be eagles representing perhaps 50% of all eagles.

I pulled these numbers out of a hat but all that to say we shouldn’t lump rare birds together with abundant ones.

Tough country killing 500m birds/year not to mention all the natural bird deaths

Except you're not counting the thousand other ways a bird could die in a particularly newsworthy way.

Not that the raw statistic is meaningful either (how many turbines were in the sample region?)

Are you really 100% for wind turbines then?? Is there a way to make them less harmful to birds? Maybe keeping the speed lower? Maybe putting up some more static installations that keep birds away? (Like, say, bright trailers on the fan blades? Is that a real idea?)

Yeah there's research being done on multiple solutions. One of them is painting one of the blades a different color which helps somehow. I don't see how there couldn't be a technical solution, it's not like these turbines are on a tight budget. It could be as complex as having autonomous drones chase away birds if nothing else works.

painting one of the blades black reduces the bird fatalities significantly from a study i read on here a few months back.

Probably, putting ultrasonic whistles on the ends would do more, and more cheaply.

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