We don't know how many birds die in structural collisions

https://robertvanwey.substack.com/p/evaluating-avian-deaths-by-collision

by chmaynard • 2 years ago

25 64 2 years ago

robertvanwey.substack.com

Terr_2• 2 years ago

For folks at home thinking about their windows: Apparently one issue is that windows may mirror the outside environment to birds, appearing as portals to more open-space and trees, especially if you include ultraviolet light which humans can't see and which the glass wasn't designed to pass-through.

So there are a variety of products advertised for home usage that stick to the outside of the window to make it appear more like a barrier, often semi-transparent to us but more-opaque in ultraviolet to birds.

LargoLasskhyfv• 2 years ago

Simpler solution.

Simply not cleaning them.

No more birdie bam then, because they see immediately what's ahead.

No more dread about smashed beaks, brains and broken wings.

Birdie sings, joy it brings!

Terr_2• 2 years ago

With apologies to Roald Dahl (The Twits):

  That evening, the Roly-Poly Bird flew round and round The Big Red House singing out,

  "There's sticky dirt stuff all over the pane!

  If you fly at the surface, you'll damage your brain!

  So fly away! Fly away! Do not crash!

  Or you'll finish up tomorrow in a cold Bird Mash!"

keeptrying2• 2 years ago

I have to leave my windows dirty so the damn birds stop smacking into it.

Furrows the brow of my wife up quite a bit.

oulipo• 2 years ago

you can also put (bird) stickers on them, so they see the window and they avoid it

keeptrying2• 2 years ago

The window has too nice a view to ruin unfortunately.

Lorean1• 2 years ago

Bird stickers unfortunately don't work, birds don't recognize them. Something like "anti collision dot stickers" will work though if the spacing between the dots is not larger than recommended.

pvaldes5• 2 years ago

The subtitle is revealing:

[We don't know how much birds kill the windmills so] "This makes it a weak argument against windmills"

"We don't know how much, so it may not happen, or is not so relevant as we think, but is repeated by ideology", is a nasty trick. Nice smoke curtain. Specially when is joined later with:

"it is true that all humanmade structures are technically bird killers, but..."

Either it happens, or it does not happen.

We aren't talking here about a sparrow crashing against a window. What we do know is that carcasses of big raptors, vultures, storks, other birds, and even bats can be found near the windmills basis often, in a distribution that is not aleatory.

Even if we never achieve to calculate an exact value (before the corpses are quietly removed by foxes or companies) we can identify that there is a problem here. As predators are scarce (by definition) and some are endangered, the impact on populations is not negligible.

Killing endangered species is illegal. It does not matter If is "just one" or "just a few" eagles.

throwaway29012• 2 years ago

Killing endangered species is illegal. It does not matter If is "just one" or "just a few" eagles.

Great logic! Let's ban skyscrapers and any windows that do not pass through UV. Use one in your house? Illegal.

pvaldes5• 2 years ago

But the biggest fallacy in this PR stunt is that outrageous "we don't know, nothing to see here":

Windmill company ESI Energy LLC, guilty of killing 150 bald and golden eagles in 8 USA states [1][2]

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/wind-energy-company-ple...

[2] https://www.justice.gov/usao-edca/pr/esi-energy-llc-wholly-o...

Use one in your house? Illegal

I'm curious, how much bald eagles crashed against your house windows lately?

bowsamic• 2 years ago

Killing endangered species is illegal. It does not matter If is "just one" or "just a few" eagles.

Well, yes it actually does, legally at least.

lazide6• 2 years ago

Also, if a bird kills itself, that isn’t illegal. Even if members of it’s species consistently does it on your particular window.

croes3• 2 years ago

So we ban cars?

So top 3 killers are cats, windows and cars and it doesn’t help if cats only kill small birds and mammals because they basically kill the food of the larger birds.

Don’t forget tire wear and all the other sources of pollution that endangers any living being.

And add climate change.

So why are wind turbines singled out?

aziaziazi2• 2 years ago

What makes you think turbines are singled out?!

There’s no point to ban them altogether neither the cats or cars. Consider a range if options between total ban and total unregulation. Thing about traffic code.

The biologists that took of look at it probably already have propositions like putting them outside of the narrowest migratory corridors or ways to be visible to birds as stickers does on German windows.

briandear• 2 years ago

Because we are building wind turbines when there are far better alternatives such as nuclear. We’re also being sold that “wind is better for the environment” when it’s not.

mrweasel2• 2 years ago

So why are wind turbines singled out?

Because some people hate the looks of wind turbines, they believe it lowers their property value. To pretend that this is about the birds is absurd, because if it was these same people would target cats as well and they are not doing that and never did.

People can be amazingly stupid. Some people in my area wanted to prevent the construction of wind turbines as it would destroy the view of the nearby fjord. They strategically forgot to mention that the turbines would be replacing a coal fired power plant (and the open air coal storage). The view is already destroyed, if anything the turbines will actually let you see the fjord and make room for a huge nature area around them.

There might also be a group of people working in the fossil fuel industry who fear that wind turbines are taking their jobs.

mcv2• 2 years ago

So why are wind turbines singled out?

Because the oil lobby only objects to windmills, and not to buildings, powerlines, domestic cats, and certainly not to cars. And the oil industry has the funds to control the narrative, and this is a narrative that may get some environmentalists to work for them.

The counter is of course to widen the discussion to all manmade structures that kill birds, especially glassy high-rises.

Sloowms2• 2 years ago

Counting the carcasses is a very flawed analysis. In cities you rarely find far less carcasses of raptors, vultures and storks. In your analysis this would lead you to making a larger built environment is a good measure to save endangered species. It would even be illegal not to do so.

pvaldes5• 2 years ago

Is true that we should keep in mind that there is an implicit "at least" 150 eagles killed by just one company. Plus all the other bird species. This value is a minimum estimation.

Several scientific studies calculate than between 234,000 and 573,093 birds on average are killed by year in USA by windmills. Big and small species. Data points that bats suffer even more than birds. (See Smallwood. 2010. The Journal of the wildlife management 71, issue 8 for example).

_y5hn• 2 years ago

We simply put up post it stickers where birds usually crashed in our windows. There's way less crashes and dead birds after that.

Think how many birds crash during a year, and how many houses and buildings with windows there are.

You can also buy bird stickers to put up.

throwaway29012• 2 years ago

Harder to do with one of those glassy skyscrapers. the ugliest and probably the deadliest for birds kind

aziaziazi2• 2 years ago

What is hard about it? They rope themselves everywhere around it to clean it up. Even a basic robot can put stickers. An even easier and cheaper way is to require it for new constructions.

emptiestplace• 2 years ago

Earth at Night in Colour S01E05 touches on this.

UniverseHacker7• 2 years ago

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.

lutorm• 2 years ago

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?

UniverseHacker7• 2 years ago

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.

stogot• 2 years ago

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

UniverseHacker7• 2 years ago

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.

amelius• 2 years ago

Deep learning to the rescue ...

pornel• 2 years ago

It's annoying that there's interest in these stats mainly as an argument against renewable energy, not from perspective of wildlife preservation. Just those particular birds are precious, not the others killed by other man-made structures, pollution, and habitats destroyed by expansion of agriculture.

I'd like to see not just more precise numbers of birds lost to wind energy, but the environmental and societal costs of not having the wind energy. Fuel extraction and processing has its environmental impact too. Lack of affordable energy (fuel poverty) costs human lives too. How many human lives are harmed to save a bird from a windmill?

mcv2• 2 years ago

Yeah, it's kinda weird, the kind of people who are suddenly pretending to be into wildlife preservation. If they were honest about it, they'd also look into bigger bird killers like high rise buildings, powerlines, cars, domestic cats. Also, climate change disrupting ecosystems is unlikely to be good.

But it's probably a good idea to build wind farms outside major migratory routes.

ChrisMarshallNY2• 2 years ago

I used to work in an upper floor of a suburban office park "mirrored-window" building.

Every day, we'd have bloody smears on the glass.

We don't know how many birds die in structural collisions

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