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Comment by _yb2s | Hacker News Reader

This author has no idea what they are talking about- we have extremely high quality data on bird kills from wind farms. Teams of wildlife biologists literally walk the farms everyday identifying kills, and they have other teams that plant fake kills as experimental controls, to accurately quantify exactly the rate that kills are missed, and correct for that. This whole process is required by law, and there are a lot of wildlife biologists that do this work. You cannot operate a wind farm without quantifying its impact on protected species.

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But it seems that the principal objection to these counts is that birds don't necessarily die on impact but may travel quite far before succumbing to their injuries, so the counts necessarily result in an underestimate of the true effect. Are you saying the area that's surveyed is large enough that this isn't true?

I’m certain these studies are able to estimate those other deaths and consider factors beyond just carcasses on the ground, because I am personally close to a biologist that works on this, but I don’t know exactly how they do it. The author here seems to be incorrectly extrapolating research statements on static buildings to windmills, when the latter is much more researched.

That seems like something very far from a certainty. Imagine if you were to cite this in a scientific paper: "a close friend of mine does this but I have no idea how they do it". What about this [1]:

> We show that the use of the ORNIS 1%, the 5% mortality criterion, and potential biological removal criteria are inadequate for providing safe thresholds with respect to the impact of wind turbine collisions on populations.

From a paper entitled "Mortality limits used in wind energy impact assessment underestimate impacts of wind farms on bird populations".

1. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.6360

Indeed, I am not qualified to answer that question and don’t have the answer, I am not planning on publishing research in this particular field anytime soon.

I am personally satisfied that this is being done by people that do deeply understand the limitations and capabilities of their work, but I cannot transfer that to you.

I do not doubt that people deeply understand the current state of the art, and that they understand those limitaitons. I am 100% in agreement.

But the fact that they understand the limitations and capabilities in their work has no bearing on the effectiveness of their work when it comes to the specific goal of protecting bird populations. (One does not logically imply the other.)

You misunderstood what I was trying to say. I closely know people that do this work with the specific personal goal of protecting bird populations. They are confident they are able to do so, and I have faith in their level of competence based on knowing them well, and also being a scientific researcher in a different but related field. I expect this to carry zero weight as an argument, I’m just explaining where I am coming from.

I am curious enough that I will ask these details and follow up if I can…

> They are confident they are able to do so

I am certain they are confident they are able to effect change within the limitations that the economic system provides, which is also another difference.

So I asked- and they said (1) when the facility is large enough, which many are, you can randomly sample locations and if they died from injuries elsewhere these will still end up in the sample; (2) they do a lot of separate experiments to measure things like the rate of carcass removal by scavengers which go into the calculations; (3) depending on the type of bird and turbine, in most cases injuries are immediately fatal, and they can quantify this for each case with direct observation.

I’ll myself add that presumably the data collected on larger farms can be used as a prior to make accurate inferences on smaller farms.

I agree there is a disconnect in pure logic, but I think it is observable that science is often conducted with a goal in mind (and is not then logically pure as a pursuit).

When the goal is the preservation of a species through the understanding of survival pressures caused by human activity, I think that understanding of the limitations of the state of the art does in fact translate into progress towards actionable understanding of the “ground truth”. This becomes manifest once you factor in the motivations of the researchers, who will use that knowledge to press further study, make new hypothesis, and couch the conclusions of their studies with this knowledge in mind.

Every advancement in understanding is built upon the knowledge of the shortcomings of previous investigations.

Thanks- most people that are researching this are doing so because they care about birds and/or alternative energy- in most cases both.

After a couple years of data collection, is it still necessary? If we scale up wind farms into thousands, I can’t imagine how many people we’d pay to look for dead birds. Or eventually this will be a drone company

It is because they are permitted to operate with a total upper limit of kills for certain protected species. They have to continually monitor, and if they hit the limit they need to seek further approval to keep operating.

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