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Windows kill something like 600 million birds per year in the USA.

There are just like, a lot of birds, and they reproduce quite quickly.

[1] https://bioone.org/journals/the-condor/volume-116/issue-1/CO...

The main killers of birds are: Cats, cars, glass windows, power lines and pesticides. The amount of birds killed by wind power is tiny in comparison. NIMBYs like to abuse this argument to avoid building wind farms while not caring for birds at all.

I don'[t think it's reasonable to kill birds in the name of questionable science, just because it's not one of the primary killers, and I think we have a responsibility to do everything possible to limit the number of deaths.

No we don't.

Wind turbines aren't questionable science and actually do reduce bird deaths compared to fossil power plants. In other words, they're fulfilling this responsibility better than expressing vague concerns.

> in the name of questionable science

... Hold on, are you suggesting that it's uncertain whether wind turbines work, or something?

Those are the main human related bird killers.

I assume 99% of birds die of other causes.

There is the assumption that there is no difference in the kind of birds killed by cats vs the kind of birds killed by wind turbines.

What are the populations and breeding rates of the birds killed by cats vs the birds killed by wind turbines?

I would say that anyone who is not looking at that data and is attempting to frame it as cats are worse so who cares is being disingenuous.

Does that data even exist or is this just supposed to be a stump argument?

I don't know if hard data exists, I have heard that wind turbines kill more raptors than other kinds of birds.

What I remember is that Wind turbines are build in large open fields that make good habitats for prey as well as creating thermals for them to lift on.

If my memory is correct, that means that wind turbines create a trap that draws in apex species by presenting them with what appears to be the ideal hunting ground and then kills them by presenting a hazard that they can not adapt to.

I have nothing against wind turbines, I rather enjoy them.

But as an aside, I think that the proponents do not listen to those who do have complains (i.e. shadows of the blades on houses, noise) and label them as NIMBY where the same groups have no issue in playing up less rational complaints about nuclear sites. I think it is a disingenuous tactic to bring up cats in the argument as they are not related to the discussion. It is similar to if we were debating Nuclear Power and I bring up that "More people drown in dam reservoirs and rivers". Sure, it is a great thing to know that I am more at risk of drowning but that does not do anything about the concerns of Nuclear Power.

Edit: Anther user has also heard the same thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37481309

Bird deaths per year is a meaningless stat — coal could easily be generating more bird deaths per year because it simply dwarfs wind in power generation. You want that in birds deaths / GW.

So, taking the numbers for wind from the article,

  In [2]: 328_000 / 35
  Out[2]: 9371.42857142857

9.3k birds / GW.

The article lacks a generation number for coal. Looking it up in [1] it's 3748 TWh/year (sigh…) or 892 GW. Taking the bird deaths per year number from the article, that gives us:

  In [1]: 7_900_000 / 892
  Out[1]: 8856.502242152466

So coal and wind are roughly comparable, with coal being marginally better at not killing birds. Which, TBH, I did not expect. Even so, the problem then with wind is still blown out of proportion.

And we should still replace coal with wind, of course.

[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-coal?tab=tabl...

> For anyone about to suggest this is because there is more coal than wind: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1943815X.2012.7...

> > It estimates that wind farms are responsible for roughly 0.27 avian fatalities per gigawatt-hour (GWh) of electricity while nuclear power plants involve 0.6 fatalities per GWh and fossil-fueled power stations are responsible for about 9.4 fatalities per GWh

Something is wrong here, then. If we use those numbers, and use the generation numbers for 2009 from [1], we get ~74,250 deaths due to wind, and ~73,479,800 deaths due to coal. These numbers are an order of magnitude off the first article's absolute death numbers, too low for wind and too high for coal.

That is distortion that fails to examine the real problem. Probably the best example of this is the Altamont Pass wind farm. It was built in a critical golden eagle breeding ground and has had a significant negative effect on the local raptor population. So go ahead and zoom out to where averages say there is no problem and maybe together we can get rid of eagles in North America forever.

Golden Eagles are 'Least Concern' according to wikipedia.

Those statistics would be much more useful scaled by power output of those respective sources. The birth date ratio between coal and wind is between 24:1 and 56:1 according to those figures - but surely the current power output of coal across the world has got to be way higher than wind? So replacing all coal with wind actually would kill more birds

Those numbers are included above: 0.27 avian fatalities per GWh for wind, 9.4 avian fatalities per GWh for coal.

I'm surprised nuclear has higher deaths, but I also feel like any large structure will cause avian deaths one way or another.

> Those numbers are included above

The comment you're responding to is asking for bird deaths / W (power output). This,

> 0.27 avian fatalities per GWh for wind, 9.4 avian fatalities per GWh for coal.

Is birth deaths / J (energy output), essentially. It's not accounting for that there's roughly 30 times as much coal generation as there is wind generation. I've put a comment elsewhere that computes the /W numbers: coal is slightly better than wind at not killing birds. The core comment stands — the issue with wind is blown out of proportion — but the stats justifying it should account for the amount of generation.

Edit: no, maybe I'm wrong here. I've not had the morning's coffee yet. While the unit is funny choice, … it should be fine. But the math doesn't check out with the first article's numbers. Table 1 from your article with the GWh numbers should contain the data I need, but the site is broken such that I cannot access table 1. So, like, these either grossly contradict the article … or something's amiss.

Edit 2: yeah, I think you do want GWh; you have to involve time somewhere, as it's a rate of bird deaths that's calculated. I think the first article's per-annum deaths is what is giving me a headache here, since it's sort of an implied rate in a lot of the writing. So /GWh works … but the math still needs to check out, which it does not appear to.

You’re off by an order of magnitude. Coal is 35.7% of the world’s electricity supply in GWh/year vs 7.5% for Wind. So it’s only 4.7x as much coal as wind.

No, I'm not. Your ratio is correct for the current numbers for coal/wind; the article is using 2009 numbers for bird deaths. If we want to fairly scale those numbers, we can't do (bird deaths from wind in 2009) / (wind power gen in 2022) or we end up with more nonsense.

In 2009, wind power gen was ~275 TWh, coal was 7817 TWh.[1] There's roughly a 30x difference between those.

[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by...

Which might be relevant if the most recent data we had was from a study published in 2009 except it’s not. As turbines got larger the deaths per GWh decreased due to multiple factors. Which is why people have largely stopped looking into it.

https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/do-wind-turbines-kill-birds

“A 2012 study found that wind projects kill 0.269 birds per gigawatt-hour of electricity produced, compared to 9.36 birds killed per gigawatt-hour of electricity from fossil fuel projects.” And things have continued to improve.

Oh, so it is - either I totally missed it or the comment has been edited since. I seem to remember the comment was quite a bit shorter when I replied (but maybe I'm just thinking of the bit I actually read!).

Coal use as a percentage of total generation is down and Wind has taken off so your intuition is wrong here. In 2022, 7.5% of the worlds electricity supply came from Wind vs 35.7% from coal so 30x easily makes up the difference.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-wind?ta...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-coal?ta...

PS: Coal was 40.5% in 2014, so the drop is only 12% in 8 years which isn’t massive but it is still significant.

The article does mention that in passing, though not specifically coal but power lines. It also mentions that house cats literally kill billions of birds a year.

The article cites another article which cites https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09601... for the coal figure

I wonder how many are taken out by our windows. More than once I've seen birds die after splashing themselves thinking it's a passage.

The issue with just citing bird kill counts is that not all birds are equally endangered or of equal conservatory value. The birds people are worried about are predominately large birds like raptors. House cats kill lots of sparrows, but they're not killing California Condors for example. A more useful analysis would need to focus on impacts of different sources specifically on endangered birds.