Reflections of a bird collision monitor | Hacker News Reader

Reflections of a bird collision monitor

audubon.org

53 pointsdeepbow8 comments

More than 1000 birds died in one night at Chicago's McCormick place. :-/ https://www.audubon.org/news/more-1000-birds-collided-single...

If you routinely have birds crashing in your windows, I encourage you to put dot stickers on them. I did that after having three birds crash in the span of 10 seconds while I was staying right behind it. Not a pleasant memory but at least it doesn't happen anymore.

How does the rate of collision compare to wind renewables? we're told the blades are a risk, it would be good to understand how this compares, and how cooling towers at traditional steam turbines compare.

> we're told the blades are a risk

This is a moral panic emanating from the same people who brought you "climate change isn't real because snow still happens". If you look at graphs of the number of preventable bird deaths due to human causes, the graph is dominated by outdoor cats (which kill billions per year), then a sliver of that is from window collisions, then the part attributable to wind turbines is too small to be visible.

https://birdhistory.substack.com/p/the-first-cat-war (graph near the bottom)

No disagree, its the availability of good hard facts to push back which interests me. The figures for Australian feral cats (6+ million) and the predation effects (billions) are so huge, it's hard to grasp sometimes.

We saw the same thing with solar thermal: "oh no the birds will fry" -well sure, some will. but compared to birds hitting glass towers, birds dying in other ways, feral cats.. not a biggie.

For specific threatened species, there are mitigations which have to be considered with wind towers. It's not nothing. But its functionally exceeded by the real risk.

Wind turbines affect different species of birds differently (they have different flight patterns and different abilities to avoid large objects) and are associated with different effects on populations of birds to those of predation.

IIRC, it's not collisions that cause most deaths, it's actually pressure effects (barotrauma; to which bats are reportedly more susceptible - eg Barclay et al. "... bat fatalities ..." paper[s]).

Larger species of bird get displaced which has a knock-on effect to the local eco-system. A particularly important point if the species is struggling to survive.

From the studies I've seen, only maybe a dozen on these topics, the bigger issue is effect on bats.

Also, fwiw, fracking and other fossil fuels do more damage to bird populations than wind turbines; but I don't feel that means we should be complacent. It's right to properly monitor the effects of new technologies on the wider environment.

There's definitely a worrying difference in reporting of 'green' harms in Western media (eg Loss et al. "Estimates of bird collisions ...").

I don't know the literal answer to your question, but I think it's hard to compare these things in a simple way because they are different kinds of damage and occur to different kinds of species.

For example, wind energy in the Bay Area tends to cause damage to daytime soaring birds like eagles, vultures, and hawks. The small migratory birds that make up the bulk of the numerical losses from San Francisco's high-rises are almost entirely unaffected by wind energy.

Yeah, in generic raw bird-lives wind-power wins easily. Even turbines designed by Vlad the Impaler aren't going to kill as many birds as the same systematic extraction and burning of fossil-fuels. [0]

> A 2012 study found that wind projects kill 0.269 birds per gigawatt-hour of electricity produced, compared to 5.18 birds killed per gigawatt-hour of electricity from fossil fuel projects.

That said, localized effects are another matter, if someone erects a bunch of wind farms around birds that are in some way vulnerable to them.

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

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