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"When you look at a wind turbine, you can find the bird carcasses and count them. With a coal-fired power plant, you can't count the carcasses, but it's going to kill a lot more birds." - John Flicker, National Audubon Society, president.Sibley and Monroe estimated that there are about 9,703 species of birds[x]. They are found on all major land masses and over the oceans. Total populations are difficult to estimate due to seasonal fluctuations but Sibley & Monroe accepted that there are between 100 and 200 billion adult birds in the world. Kevin Gaston and Tim Blackburn[xi] doubled that estimate with 200 to 400 billion. Birds are killed by wind turbines and solar installations, but it turns out that the numbers of birds already killed by pollution from oil and gas, buildings, high tension lines, vehicles, cats, dogs and pesticides are so much greater that there is clearly a perception twist going on here, which is likely deliberate. This is not to say that we should be complacent about bird deaths. It’s a universally accepted fact that all parties are against any kind of animal mortality as a result of our energy activities. The presentation of it though, ought to be based on the factual wider context of bird deaths from other causes. The Altamont pass was one of the first locations in the U.S. that was preserved for wind power due to the excellent winds funneled by the hills. At the time bird deaths were not on the minds of the individuals who created this wind resource.BIRD DEATHS FROM DIFFERENT CAUSESBird deaths from different causes, showing that wind turbines are the least of threats among many. Source, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, U.S. Forestry Service. Not included in this chart are numbers of bird deaths caused by pollution and climate change which are responsible for the ongoing 6th extinction event.Even institutions who are protective of birds, the National Audubon Society, the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Wildlife Society all have commissioned studies that result in the same conclusions afforded by the above chart.Bird deaths by wind turbines do not remotely compare with the impact of cats, cars, power lines or buildings. As wind power increases its penetration however, its currently small impact on birds will grow less than proportionately as operators learn how to avoid avian mortality by siting, colors on blades, kick in speeds and other methods. Perception of bird deaths can halt wind turbine installations during the public planning phase and then effective resistance can scuttle installation plans. It turns out though, that wind turbines are responsible for only 1 in every 10,000 bird deaths.Small birds are killed in the millions by housecats while wind turbine casualties tend to be relatively larger bird species. Bigger birds, normally not the direct target of a housecat, like the protected Bald Eagles and other birds of prey, are more likely to be killed by a wind turbine than by a cat. Balanced against this must be the effect of coal and oil on birds mentioned in the earlier solar report. Many energy technologies apparently are bad for birds, but wind and solar are far from being the worst culprits. In 2013 a study[xii] by Smallwood indicated that the estimates of wind turbine bird deaths may be understated for three reasons. Estimates of bird deaths by wind turbines depended on counting carcasses found under the turbines. It was entirely possible that searches were done in less than efficient ways and in inadequate search radiuses. Additionally, carcasses could easily be removed by predators and his bird death estimate was 573,000, slightly higher than others.A 2005 study by the USDA Forest Service, was an early indication that wind turbines were a very small impact on overall bird populations.[xiii] The National Audubon Society produced a study[xiv], funded by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in September, 2014 which took seven years to finish and which looked closely at 588 of the total 800 species of bird found in North America. 314 of these species are threatened in some way with a loss of environment by the end of the century. Climate change (therefore CONG) is blamed for effectively potentially destroying the ecosystem for 28 species. This data is not included in the chart above in Figure 31. The Bald Eagle and state mascots are at serious risk due to climate change which reduces the bird’s range and alters the lifecycle of their food sources. Bird mortality from fossil fuel pollution and climate change represents a far higher risk than wind turbines as far as the Audubon Society is concerned.A recent study[xv] by the North American Bird Conservation Initiative (NABCI), highlighted climate and environmental impacts on 1,154 native bird species in North America, Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. The study was compiled by experts from all three countries and accounted for population trends and breeding ranges as well as the severity of threats. Due to changes in the environment, caused by man, birds in every habitat, but especially oceans and tropical forests are of highest conservation concern. In geological-time terms, these species-level impacts are happening in a human instant. 432 species merit a level of “high concern” due to declining populations and habitat loss and climate change. Species with long migration paths have suffered 70% losses in the last 50 years. We are all familiar with some famous bird species that have gone extinct such as the Dodo, the Great Auk, the Emu and of course the Passenger Pidgeon mentioned below. The oldest international nature conservation group, BirdLife International says that since the year 1500, 140 bird species have found extinction, and 22 of those in the last 50 years[xvi]. The rates of extinction are accelerating.I want to use evocative language here. The legacy of the Earth’s embrace of life and its eager occupation of different environments is something I believe we can so much better appreciate, since we are intimately a part of that process. We are part of a huge evolutionary, life miracle that we are only just now beginning to explore. Previous estimates for the number of species on Earth ranged from 3 to 100 million. PLos Biology published a report[xvii] in 2011 which was written by the Census of Marine Life scientists. It established a more accurate estimate of 8.74 million species on Earth of which 7.77 million are animals (only 953,4343 described). They used statistical methods to provide a more realistic estimate which nonetheless gave an error level of +/- 1.3 million. Bacteria and other small organisms were not counted. 86% of all land creatures and 91% of ocean creatures have yet to be identified. Only 1.2 million species have been officially registered in the Catalogue of Life and the World Register of Marine Species. The detail of the success of the DNA molecule in evolving all these species in this life encouraging Earthly environment over billions of years will never be properly appreciated, but it is at risk from our misadventure with the chemical legacy of CONG and our despoliation of habitats, both marine and terrestrial. We know more about the 22 million books in the Library of Congress than we know about our fellow species on Earth. We are also putting many species in danger of extinction because of the use of fossil fuels in what’s been termed the 6th great extinction level event, currently underway.Another great perspective on this is the work of a collector of natural sounds, Bernie Krause[xviii] who has spent decades capturing the sounds of nature around the world in places as far afield as Alaska and the Amazon, the Arctic and Fiji, the Great Plains and Mexico’s Chihuahuan grasslands. He also has an astonishing TED talk[xix] in which he describes how he separates sound into geophony; or wind, water and Earth sounds, biophany; the sounds of natural organisms and anthrophany; predictably the sounds of human noise. What he has recently discovered is very sobering. Recordings taken in the 1970’s compared to recordings taken in the same location today show declines or disappearance of species. Nature is going silent over the Anthropocene. John Bakeless, in his book on discovering America[xx], talks about how early explorers were acutely interested in the sound of nature and developed a faculty of listening and observing to identify birds and insects. I remember our guide, on the last day of a 10 day Colorado river rafting expedition on the calmer 60 miles of the Colorado River just prior to Lake Mead, asking all 28 of the rafters to sit for 30 minutes and listen carefully to nature and then exchange what they had heard. Indeed, there was a sudden realization of insects buzzing, water chirping under the raft, wind in the leaves of trees, echoes of sounds around rock walls and birds, distant and close, calling for myriad purposes of alarm, food or connection. My point here is that while human impacts on the Earth’s wildlife are currently very severe because of our chemical CONG energy impacts, moving to renewable energy reverses the situation over time, even if there are more humans around.Birds are famously victims of the huge wind turbine blades. This is certainly true and although bird fatalities from the house cat, vehicles and building windows account for literally millions or billions more, it doesn’t excuse the wind turbine’s effects impact. Efforts are made to relocate turbines out of birds’ migration paths. Also, most song birds migrate flying at a height of 2,000 to 4,000 feet, well above the tallest wind turbines, at least so far. There is a very disturbing YouTube video of a large, elegant bird of prey being struck down by such a rotating blade[xxi]. In an awful European case, there was the death of a rare swift, the White-throated Needletail, the world’s fastest flying bird[xxii]. The poor exhausted creature was spotted by a group of 30 birdwatchers who had made a special trip to the isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. The sighting was only the 9th time that the bird had been seen since 1846, in Essex, UK. The last time it had been seen at all was 1991. The assembled enthusiasts assembled in the appropriate location and waited for hours before being rewarded by sighting the bird. They were summarily horrified to see the rare bird, which had flown all the way from Australia, perhaps several times, knocked down and killed by the rotating blade of a wind turbine.[xxiii]Between 2004 and 2009 in Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, just 85, unprotected, migratory birds were deemed to have died due to exposure to oil and gas facilities owned by Exxon Mobil. The Justice Department fined the company $600,000 or about $7,000 for each bird killed.Exxon pleaded guilty and cooperated with the department spending a further $2.5 million to clean up the sites. It turned out that the fine was equal to twenty minutes of Exxon’s profits, based on $8.6 billion earnings for the first half of 2009[xxiv]. Other fossil fuel companies have been fined. BP paid $100 million for the impact of its 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill on migratory birds. Pacificorp, which operates coal fired power stations, paid $500,000 in 2009 after 232 eagles along power distribution lines between its substations were found to have been electrocuted.[xxv]Wind farms started to kill birds on a regular basis prompting calls of hypocrisy against those claiming that wind was an environmental solution. Wind farms have been fined for killing birds too, however. Duke Energy was fined $1 million for the deaths of 14 eagles and 149 other birds, including hawks, blackbirds, wrens and sparrows, between 2009 and 2013. Duke were also called upon to restore and do community service (how do you ask a large utility to do that!) and were placed on 5 years of probation while they put together an environmental compliance plan to prevent bird deaths. Interestingly, Duke then applied for a permit to kill eagles, to help provide a context within which the system can absorb the inevitability of bird deaths. Another group, the Wind Capital Group applied for such a license only to be embroiled in an argument over its granting, by the Osage Nation in opposition. Many applications for this license have been filed. Environmentalists complain bitterly when President Obama’s administration, eager for non-polluting wind power, announced a new federal rule that allows wind farms to lawfully kill birds of prey.There is some evidence that birds change their behavior when in the presence of wind farms. Lowther in 1998 discovered that studying a 22-turbine wind farm in Wales, UK, no birds were killed by the turbine and in fact they were seen to have shifted their activity to a different location. Some wind farms have no bird fatalities at all. A study[xxvi] published in the Journal of Applied Ecology by Pawel Plonczkier and Ian Simms monitored migrating flocks of pink-footed geese using radar as they returned during migration to the shores of Lincolnshire, UK. Monitoring the movement of the birds over 4 years from 2007 to 2010, established that two new wind farms effectively caused the geese to change their flight paths. The proportion of goose flocks flying outside the wind farm locations climbed from 52% to 81% in this time and even geese flying through the windfarm area had increased their altitude to climb above the turbines.An Australian online group called RenewEconomy had an article which summarizes the whole bird situation quite nicely called “Want to save 70 million birds a year? Build more wind farms”, drawing attention to the impact of CONG on birds. Replacing all fossil fuel worldwide, it says, would save about 70 million birds a year establishing wind farms as a strong net benefit for birds. Author Mike Bernard[xxvii] explains that wind farms kill less than 0.0001 percent of birds killed by human activities annually out of a total 1.5% of human caused mortality.Bats and Barotrauma - The other species which more recently became synonymous with death by wind turbine blade is bats. Most of the damage is done to migratory bat species in the autumn. Bats are famously known for their ability to echo locate hard objects in their local environment, such as tree branches or cave walls, and even insects on the wing while they are feeding. They can detect moving objects better than stationary objects so the high death rate from wind turbine blades was puzzling. Several explanations were proposed but 90% of the bat fatalities involved internal hemorrhaging just as might be expected with damage caused by sudden air pressure changes.Birds have a more resistant respiratory anatomy and are killed by being hit by the blades, whereas the bats do avoid the blades, but come so close that pressure changes around the blades cause the damage to their lungs. The mammals have larger, flexible lungs and hearts. Birds have compact, rigid lungs with very strong pulmonary capillaries which can resist the higher-pressure changes, even though the blood/gas barriers are thinner than those of the bats. An airfoil on a plane pushes against the wind but a wind turbine blade is moved by the wind. In either case, the airfoil cross section causes significant differences in air pressure. The greatest area of low pressure exists at the fast moving (approximately 180 mph) tip of the blade and cascades downwind from the moving blade. A zone of low pressure can cause a bat’s lungs to expand causing tissue damage, or barotrauma.A study[xxviii] was paid for by fossil fuel companies like Suncor and Shell, but also from wind turbine companies such as TransAlta Wind and Alberta Wind Energy Corporation as well as academic institutions. They found bat bodies from hoary and silver-haired bats killed at a wind farm in south western Alberta, Canada and examined them for internal injuries. Of 188 bat bodies collected, 87 had no external physical injury. Very few bats had external injuries without internal bleeding.In 2012, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory conducted pressure studies[xxix] on mice, which were used because they are a close approximation to bats and discovered that pressures of only 1.4 kilopascals (kPa) were experienced by the bats at the blade tips in 11 mph winds but that it took 30 kPa to cause fatality in mice. There was no suggestion by NREL for an alternative cause of death however. At low windspeeds the pressures are even lower and yet it is at the low speeds that the bats fly which further confuses the issue.[i] Wind energy is considered a disaster responding to the hoax of climate change in this vociferous website which of course also discusses wind turbine syndrome. Available at: What is Wind Turbine Syndrome?[ii] The Caithness Windfarm Information Forum. Available at: Caithness Windfarm Information Forum[iii] RenewableUK. A leading renewable energy trade association. Available at: http://www.renewableuk.com/en/events/conferences-and-exhibitions/renewableuk-2015/[iv] Risø National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy. Available at: Risø National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy[v] Available at: LiveLeak.com - Two Dead in Windmill Fire[vi] David Wahl, Philippe Giguere. Ice Shedding and Ice Throw – Risk and Mitigation. Wind Application Engineering. GE Energy. Available at: http://www.cbuilding.org/sites/cbi.drupalconnect.com/files/ger4262.pdf[vii] Cattin et al. Wind Turbine Ice Throw Studies in the Swiss Alps. EWEC 2007. Based on studies of a 600 kW Enercon E-40 at 2,300 mASL in Swiss Alps[viii] Summary of Wind Turbine Accident Data to 30 September 2014. PDF. Caithness Windfarm Information Forum.[ix] Payback time for renewable energy. NREL factsheet. Available at: http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/57131.pdf[x] Sibley and Monroe. 1992.[xi] Kevin J. Gaston and Tim M. Blackburn. April 1997. How many birds are there? Available at: How many birds are there?[xii] K. Shawn Smallwood, “Comparing bird and bat fatality-rate estimates among North American wind-energy projects”, Wildlife Society Bulletin, 26 Mar. 2013. Available at: Comparing bird and bat fatality-rate estimates among North American wind-energy projects[xiii] Wallace P. Erickson, Gregory D. Johnson and David P. Young Jr. A Summary and Comparison of Bird Mortality from Anthropogenic Causes with an Emphasis on Collisions. USDA Forest Service. PSW-GTR-191. 2005. Available at: http://www.fs.fed.us/psw/publications/documents/psw_gtr191/Asilomar/pdfs/1029-1042.pdf[xiv] Erickson WP, Wolfe MM, Bay KJ, Johnson DH, Gehring JL (2014) A Comprehensive Analysis of Small-Passerine Fatalities from Collision with Turbines at Wind Energy Facilities. PLoS ONE 9(9): e107491. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0107491[xv] State of North America's Birds 2016. North American Bird Conservation Initiative. Available at: Main Results[xvi] BirdLife International (2014) We have lost over 150 bird species since 1500. Presented as part of the BirdLife State of the world's birds website. Available from: BirdLife Data Zone[xvii] PLos Biology published a report in 2011 which was written by the Census of Marine Life scientists. Available to: How Many Species Are There on Earth and in the Ocean?[xviii] Bernie Krause. A recorder of natural sounds in many global habitats. Available at: The World's Disappearing Natural Sound[xix] Bernie Krause. TED Talk. The voice of the natural world. TEDGlobal 2013 · 14:48 · Filmed Jun 2013. Available at: The voice of the natural world[xx] John Bakeless. America As Seen by Its First Explorers: The Eyes of Discovery. Dover Language Books & Travel Guides. Paperback – January 20, 2011. Available at: America As Seen by Its First Explorers: The Eyes of Discovery (Dover Language Books & Travel Guides): John Bakeless: 0800759260317: Amazon.com: Books[xxi] Bald Eagle seriously injured by wind turbine. Available at: Bird killed by green energy[xxii] The White Throated Needletail death on YouTube. Geobeats news service. July 1, 2013. Available at: Rare Bird Killed by Wind Turbine in Front of Horrified Spectators[xxiii] Rare swift killed by Scottish wind turbine. Available at: Birdwatchers see rare bird killed by wind turbine[xxiv] Exxon Mobil pleads guilty to bird deaths. Available at: ExxonMobil pleads guilty to killing birds[xxv] BP and Pacificorp pay fines for killing birds. Available at: The Obama Administration Is Ignoring The Massacre Of Thousands Of Hawks, Falcons, And Eagles Every Year[xxvi] Pawel Plonczkier and Ian C. Simms. Journal of Applied Ecology. 2012. Available at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2664.2012.02181.x/epdf[xxvii] Mike Barnard. 10 August, 2012. Want to save 70 million birds a year? Build more wind farms. RenewEconomy. Available at: Want to save 70 million birds a year? Build more wind farms[xxviii] Erin F. Baerwald, Genevieve H. D’Amours, Brandon J. Klug and Robert M.R. Barclay. Barotrauma is a significant cause of bat fatalities at wind turbines.[xxix] “NREL Study Finds Barotrauma Not Guilty”, November 27, 2012. Available at: http://www.nrel.gov/wind/news/2013/2149.html[xxx] Germany has 74% of its power supplied by renewable energy. 2014. Available at: For One Hour, Germany Was Powered By 74% Renewables - Gas 2[xxxi] Information supplied by Agora Energiewende, a research institute in Berlin, showed that Germany’s demand for electricity was almost 100% supplied by renewable energy including a large amount of wind on the 15th May, 2016. Available at: Germany Just Got Almost All of Its Power From Renewable Energy[xxxii] Posthumous pardons of First World War shellshock victims. Available on: Pardoned: the 306 soldiers shot at dawn for 'cowardice'[xxxiii] Information Paper: Evidence on Wind Farms and Human Health. February 2015. PDF. National Health and Medical Research Council. Available at: http://www.nhmrc.gov.au/_files_nhmrc/publications/attachments/eh57a_information_paper.pdf[xxxiv] Ian Clark, William N. Alexander, William J. Devenport, Stewart A. Glegg, Justin Jaworski, Conor Daly, and Nigel Peake. "Bio-Inspired Trailing Edge Noise Control", 21st AIAA/CEAS Aeroacoustics Conference, AIAA AVIATION Forum, (AIAA 2015-2365). Available at: Bio-Inspired Trailing Edge Noise Control[xxxv] UK Renewable Energy Roadmap. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/48128/2167-uk-renewable-energy-roadmap.pdf[xxxvi] Positive environmental impacts of offshore wind farms. European Wind Energy Association. Available at: http://www.ewea.org/fileadmin/files/members-area/information-services/offshore/research-notes/120801_Positive_environmental_impacts.pdf