![]() ![]() It is also important to maintain perspective on why the rapid development of wind power is taking place. On the flip side, modelling of bird deaths fails to account for new designs and technologies, such as painting blades black or curtailing movement at certain times, which may help protect more birdlife in the future. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, a UK charity, warned at the start of 2021 that new offshore wind developments in the North Sea threatened one particular seagull, the kittiwake, as they headed to their feeding grounds. Studies have shown it is often larger birds of prey, of which there are fewer in an ecosystem, that are more likely to fly into blades. Of course, simply looking at the total number of birds killed fails to acknowledge that particular species may be disproportionately affected. The 90% increase in wind power from 2021–50 envisaged by the EIA would see 2.22 million birds killed annually by mid-century. It is also significantly less than the 5–6.8 million killed each year by communication towers, the 60–80 million killed by automobiles, the 67–90 million killed by pesticides, or the 365 million to one billion killed by cats each year in the US, according to a study published in Nature.Įven if we adapt Merriman’s model to reflect the predicted increase in wind power across the US, as modelled by the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) in its outlook for 2021, turbine deaths come nowhere close to these figures. This is a lot of birds, but it is only 0.016% of the estimated 7.2 billion birds that live in the US.
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