Gov. allows killing thousands of birds and bats

[bluemoth]

This has been an ongoing problem sence wind turbine farms where created many years ago. Now wind turbine companies are trying to get 30 year permit instead of the current 5 year permit to kill wild life with the wind turbines. Fish and game calls kills by wind turbines accidental!! What a shocker that is. We all know by now killing wild life this way is no accident. Now if a creature runs out in front of you car just seconds be for you pass you will not have anuff time to react. That is a true accidental kill. But wind power companies know they kill wild life by now and is no accident. Shame on fish and game for not protecting our wild life. I am guessing some body in FG got payed off whith a lot of cash some ware to allow this to keep happening. Dos this mean if we hit an indagered insect with a car we can keep it because its an accident. May be a California Condor needs to be hit by wind turbine be fore FG dos any thing to stop this horrible thing that is happening. All Condors are tracked by GPS and can travel 150 to 200 miles a day to find food. There are 4 condor release sites in the US. Five to ten young captive reared Condors are released at each site each year. They want to have 400 condors at each releas site in the future. Just a matter of time be for a Condor is killed by wind turbine.

Estimated kills by wind turbine :

888,000 bats 2013
573,000 birds{83,000 were raptors}2012
4,200 Bald eagles - no year given

[wingedwishes]

I'd be very interested in reading about this. Can you tell me the source for the estimated kills?

[bluemoth]

Info came from news paper article from the 17. The new law {30 year permit} would allow 4,200 bald eagles to be killed a year by wind turbines. There are currently 74,434 bald eagles in the US. the Wildlife Society Bulletin gave the estimates of bat and bird kills. Wind turbine companies do not currently have to report kills so preventing more then 4,200 Bald eagles from being killed per year would be imposible. That is a nice handy loop hole in the law for the turbine companies. So maddening. So if this is allowed why dos FG fine you for picking up road kill when it is truly accidental? Laws are so messed up!!

[jshuey]

If you're talking about the Midwest Wind Energy Multi-species habitat conservation plan... you can access it here www.midwestwindhcp.com/documents.htm. The document runs about 1,500 pages (very long appendices)- but the first few chapters are where the rubber meets the road. Public comments are dues in a few weeks.

The bottom line is that if you kill a "federal trust species" you have to mitigate for that take. Trust species include endangered species and eagles (they're in a special class by themselves). Included are several species of bats, but not all bats.

Typical mitigation includes protection of habitat or implementation of measures that will reduce mortality at other sites. For example, if you kill an eagle with a turbine, you can install deterrents that reduce injuries along transmission lines. If you kill an Indiana bat, you can conserve 40 acres of forested habitat and give that land to a park or other conservation group.

And yes, under the HCP, wind farms must monitor "incidental take" for all trust species.

John

[cabintom]

Yeah, I'm very curious where those numbers of kills were sourced from.

Actually, after a quick google search, my money is on those numbers being based on this Wikipedia article: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_wind_power#Impact_on_wildlife

...and they pulled the worst numbers available from it.

I find it interesting that the wiki article cites a Canadian study that showed 8.2 bird deaths per turbine per year... it would seem that I've lived in houses far more dangerous to birds than wind turbines.

Edit: To say I find it staggering how many more birds are killed by communications towers and, especially, power lines.

[wingedwishes]

Did quite a bit of reading and the hard part is this: there are different kinds of turbines with different estimated numbers of kills which also appear to vary by region. The original turbines killed much more than the new models. The old ones are not being changed out very fast.

What is not apparent is the number of kills compared to the less spectacular number of deaths caused by fossil fuel power plant degradation of habitat.

So solar? There are deaths attributed to solar farms as well. Worse yet is the pollution connected with some of the Chinese companies manufacturing the panels.