“Countless innocent birds that only want to be with their eggs die every year from crashing into wind turbines. The environmentalists who promote wind energy at the expense of the birds are green pigs!”
The National Center for Public Policy Research media release is below.
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Occupy Occupy D.C. Wind Turbine to Memorialize Dead Birds, Despoiled Land
Washington, D.C. – A mock wind turbine will be erected Monday, March 12 at noontime in Washington, D.C.’s Freedom Plaza to highlight the threat that wind, a celebrated alternative energy source, poses to the American bird community.
“If I was a bird, I’d be an angry bird right now,” said David Almasi, executive director of the National Center for Public Policy Research and director of the National Center’s “Occupy Occupy DC” project. “Countless innocent birds that only want to be with their eggs die every year from crashing into wind turbines. The environmentalists who promote wind energy at the expense of the birds are green pigs!”
Monday’s event is part of The National Center for Public Policy Research’s “Occupy Occupy D.C.” events at Freedom Plaza. The National Center obtained a five-week permit from the U.S. Park Service that forces the Occupy D.C. encampment to share the park between February 12 and March 15.
A report by the National Research Council estimated that wind turbines kill approximately 100,000 birds every year. The American Bird Conservancy claims the number could be triple that estimate — affecting the songbird community most of all.
“At some point the slaughter of birds and bats by taxpayer-subsidized wind turbines is going to trigger serious legal action,” added National Center Senior Fellow Bonner Cohen, Ph.D. “If the full force of the Migratory Bird Treaty and the Endangered Species Act were brought to bear on these unsightly killing machines, investors would turn their backs on this artificial industry in a heartbeat.”
The National Center for Public Policy Research, founded in 1982, is a non-partisan, free-market, independent conservative think-tank with over 100,000 recent supporters. Contributions to it are tax-deductible and greatly appreciated.
Jek, those are just toys at this point. They do not exists in sizes that can provide large-scale power. Plus the added cost of the much larger amount of metal needed and lowered efficiency makes them even less economically efficient than the blade-style.
OKAY. You’ve convinced me to at least oppose the bladed windmills, but I’m still for the smaller verticle-column or turbo-type, okay? I can see the blade-type are too much of an advance for a bird to overcome, so I’ll now OPPOSE them. If crops fail, rodentia may swarm, so raptor-loss may have to be augmented with? More Cats? More snakes(–only good half the year)? More no-kill traps?
The GREEN-Meanie-weenies have the money & the time. Has anyone read Edward Albee books? He had a crew of “wreckers” and, he was coming from the Left, but the Tactics of those he wrote about were ones we could, individually, adopt, possibly. Of course, one would NEVER do anything illegal, but maybe teams of one have to do NON-illegal “stuff”. to confuse/change those whose agenda, will destroy not only our lives & livelihoods, but the lives of those persecuting us, at the end of things. There’s “stuff” that can be done, that will only annoy the Greens, but annoyance may sometimes be enough to slow/stop their progress.
Watch the blades on a wind turbine and they look to be moving quite slow but in reality the tip of the blade is traveling at 100 mph or better. A bird might have a hard time avoiding a collision at that speed.
USFWS claims 450,000 birds killed by turbine strikes each year yet they do nothing to stop the mass slaughter of raptors, song birds, etc. By the same token they attempt to gain control of thousands of acres of land through Habitat Conservations Plans under the auspices of the Endangered Species Act. They use satellite imagery to identify the habitat and claim endangered species exist without any ground truth of the images or to confirm the presence of the species. Your tax dollars at work.
Because they CAN’T! DUH!! Really that is a stupid question.
Jek, have you ever driven at night in an area that has a lot of deer or elk, or even just rabbits? The critters will stand at the side of the road, and watch your car approach. Then, just about the time you are going to pass them, they suddenly decide to jump into your path. If the jump is just right, they end up on your hood and possibly also your windshield. I have even had them jump and simply run into the side of the car. Animals are very often not intuitive, but simply react.
Now, with birds, their natural landing places are quite often in trees. Most birds don’t fly very far without landing and resting. The branches of trees are often moving because of wind. It is very possible that the birds are simply trying to land on what their eyes perceive as a branch. They mistake the movement as being the normal movement of a tree branch in the wind. And if they are flying on the sunward side of the blades, they will not be frightened by the moving shadow. As the bird stalls out in preparation for a landing, they are in a perfect spot to be whacked by a blade.
I have heard of “bird brains”, but I mistakenly thought the birds were smarter than the label. Now, imo, there are a LOT of “bird brains” that are warmists, but then it helps them avoid those windmill, “blades of Reality”…
Ever heard the term “bird brain”?
The birds do see the blades, since these blades are quite large (50 to 200 ft typically) they seem to be slow moving objects and birds treat them accordingly. The problem is that the rotating air blades change the airflow around them, drawing air through the blades, at distances comparable to the blade lengths (which is one reason why the turbines are typically separated by distances of up to 5 blade lengths from each other). Thus the birds treat the turbine towers as other inanimate objects in their environment but if they happen to get too close they are drawn in through the area spanned by the blades. Moreover regions with constant directional winds tend to be used by migratory birds and by raptors (raptors in order to hunt have to cover large areas and to safe their own energy they prefer to glide and ride the winds) thus leading to a large number of bird fatalities. Currently the US Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that wind farms in the USA kill 450,000 birds per year.
probably birds do not ‘see’ the blades because they are in motion and they are quite large and not equal in size to what would prey on the birds and there are considerable gaps between spinning blades because they are not spinning at 1000+ rpm so it does not appear to be a solid object
the noise produced is monotone and not scary unlike sudden noises are (gunshot)
as for ‘shadows’ they do not exist at night or on cloudy days, in fact, the blades are generally painted to blend in with clouds as it where, they are not painted with a strongly contrasting color which makes them blend into the scenary making it harder for birds to see them
birds are not smart enough to see another bird get hit by a blade and then think they need to avoid it
maybe in a few thousand years (of evolution) birds would adapt
just the same, I was reading and found this interesting (and related) paragraph
To the nearest whole number, the percentage of the world’s energy that comes from wind turbines today is: zero. Despite the regressive subsidy (pushing (British) pensioners into fuel poverty while improving the wine cellars of grand estates), despite tearing rural communities apart, killing jobs, despoiling views, erecting pylons, felling forests, killing bats and eagles, causing industrial accidents, clogging motorways, polluting lakes in Inner Mongolia with the toxic and radioactive tailings from refining neodymium, a ton of which is in the average turbine – despite all this, the total energy generated each day by wind has yet to reach half a per cent worldwide.
I AM SERIOUS. I really, don’t “GET” that a bird, over time, wouldn’t watch for those blades. The blades throw a huge shadow, and birds will instinctively veer from those, because shadows mean predator. I’m a cyclist, and I see VERY FEW birds hit by cars, although I know it happens. I’ll take your ire, Gamecocked, I’m trembling. I don’t think birds are that STUPID to not avoid the blades. I could be wrong. Do they(the blades) travel too fast? Don’t they(the windmills) make an objectionable noise(–maybe could use ultra-sonic whistles to warn birds away)? You KNOW the birds would NOT “line-up” to fly into the blades, one after the other, just because their nests may be just the other side of the blades. Would we lose a bird/day? A dozen? You Don’t KNOW, how many, Gamecocked, do you? I don’t CARE about windmills, this is about the birds. Take your chip off of your shoulder, and just tell me, and then, probably, I’ll know. MAYBE I’ll join you in opposing windmills, although you are quick to the offense, and telegraph that you’re in your teens?
You mean like why do birds get hit by cars?
So it’s the birds’ fault? You’ve got my ire.
This will probably earn me ire, but WHY can’t the birds SEE that those turbines are something to be flown around?