Scott and Richard both posted informative comments about the impact of windpower on birds.? I'd like to thank them both for their efforts and encourage others to read them.
?
-Rolan

Rolan Nelson
Fircrest, WA
rnbuffle at yahoo.com

--- On Sun, 8/17/08, Scott Downes <downess at charter.net> wrote:

From: Scott Downes <downess at charter.net>
Subject: [Tweeters] re: Wind Power
To: tweeters at u.washington.edu
Date: Sunday, August 17, 2008, 10:51 AM





As a wildlife biologist that does alot of work with wind power research and impact analysis I would like to comment on Richard's statements. Several of his comments are correct, several in my professional opinion are quite inaccurate and I would like to clarify.
?
Unfortunately, the environmental impact work on windpower, which we called for
30 years ago, stinks. Today, we know four things:


1. The early windmachines sited at Altamont Pass and other California locations
were ( and are) highly efficient raptor killers.

Yes, they were, however newer generation towers, none have shown the dramatic amounts of kills such as at Altamont. In the PNW (and just about every wind farm installed to date has had a 1-2 post construction fatality monitoring study), the highest rate to date of raptor kills is 0.25 raptors per turbine per year, while the average is 0.08. So if you had 1000 turbines, the average would equate to 80 raptors per year. Is this signifciant? Richard is correct, honestly we don't know. It probably depends on what species being killed. Can populations of Kestrels or Red-tailed Hawks handle this? Possibly? Can Golden Eagles or Ferruginous Hawks??Probably not.?The reason for the uncertaintly doesnt lie with what impact wind farms are likely to have (many farms have post construction monitoring projects, there is alot of data?on impacts and much of it?follows well known patterns of other research at other wind projects, so there is ability to make well
informed predictions), the reason for incertainty is that we dont know the full population levels and full direct of their populations of these raptors. For example, are American Kestrels increasing or decreasing? The most relevant data usually cited is the Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) while good data, it has inherrant flaws and yet this is what is cited for population trends. How many red-tailed hawks nest in E WA? Answer, who knows...?

2. Large structures of all kinds are major killers of birds during migration.
This is whay too generic. The emphasis behind this is the large communication tower kills. For example in the PNW, again for all bird (including raptors) fatality rates, highest is 4.7 and average is 2.38 per turbine per year. So again, 1000 turbines, 2380 birds per year would be killed. Data shows that most of these are passerines and Horned Lark (most/all wind farm to date are in the?grassland/steppe areas?for the PNW) comprises about 35% of all bird fatalities, passerines comprising about 80% of all bird fatalities, with other birds like Western Meadowlark, Kinglets, Sparrows being other common fatalities. Again the question, siginificant? Answer, we don't know. Is this because we dont know what wind farms kill? NO. In the PNW there is amazing correlations between one farm to the next, for example HOLA is the biggest fatality in almost every wind farm to date in the PNW and the range of all bird fatalities is currently 0.6-4.7, a range but fairly
consistent. By the way, farms back east have had larger numbers of songbirds, but if you want to know all facts I encourage you to start researching wildlife/wind power at nationalwind.org (website of the joint venture of agencies, environmental groups, consultants, industry on working to solve research). Why don't we know the impacts to?songbirds? Because of the following? Do we know population size of even Horned Lark in the Columbia Basin? Best source again is the BBS estimates. When?Golden-crowned Kinglets are killed, where does the bird come from? Don't know, could be WA cascades population, could be from further north, so if dont know the source we dont know what population is impacted and if its significant. ?Is the problem that wind farm impacts arent being well understood, not really. It is far most basic ornitholigical knowledge in that we dont really know migration patterns of population A, B and C for a species and we only know huge
ballpark figures based off the BBS which has inherrant flaws, but is the best we have.

3. We know next to nothing about the avian impactsof the much larger wind
turbines now being installed.
Again, this just isnt true. Are people aware of the fact that just about every winf farm in OR and WA currently suggests extensive pre-construction widlife surveys to determine sensitive species impacts, avian use components and most counties require post-construction fatality monitoring studies to know the impacts. As stated above, over a dozen fatality monitoring studies have been finished in the PNW and quite a few more are on-going. Our range is about 1-4 birds, for projects ranging from Walla Walla to Vantage to Bickelton that is a fairly narrow category.

4.? Avian impact assessments of wind turbines is devilishly difficult.
Depends on your definition of "devilish difficult". If project A is being construction and project B adjoining the project had completed a Fatality monitoring study and we've done at least a year of pre-construction intensive avian studies on Project A. Is it difficult? Of course, are we usually in the general ballpark, actually yes. For example impact might predict about 2-3 birds (its silly to try to go into decimal figures on impacts) projects are usually surprising close. Again if people are curious I can direct people to sources so you dont have to trust me.
?
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On a side note, avian impacts are the only impacts. Bats are a very real part of fatalities, just about every project in the PNW and most projects in the nation have had bat fatalities. In the PNW, range is 0.63-3.21 and average is 1.4 bat per turbine per year. Again eastern projects have had much larger impacts, can research to learn more. Almost all (~90% are of Silver-haired and hoary Bats) and most occur in August-October (~85% of all fatalities occur in these 3 months). So do we know fairly well impacts. Actually yes. Do we know if these levels are siginifcant? Nope. Why? Because bats are notoriously under-studied and we have no idea what the population levels of bats are? Furthermore we have no idea where the Hoary Bats are coming from? Cascades? Farther north? So is the research on wind farms the source of the uncertainty? No. Same with avian studies.... basic biological information isn't known. How many Hoary Bats do we have out there? Where do
they migrate from and to? Further, nationwide, most projects have found the same trends in terms of timing of bat fatalities and species composition as the PNW.
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Richard ended with saying he's scared. I don't think scared is the right approach. Concerned, absolutely. The following isnt a political opinion, in fact I hope the whole post has been read with no political bias, because honestly I don't have one regarding wind power. There are good and bad and alot of gray area. The human population is growing. We haven't found a way to get everyone to conserve electricity, so we need more and more. What we have currently isnt enough. The final question to ask yourself is there are currently several sources of electric?power?known in the country: Hydro, wind/solar, coal, nuc (and a couple other). We need electricity. Until people start conserving, they all have their negatives. Question is what has the more negative impacts? Is wind more negative than coal? more negative than hydro? Again there is no clear cut answers, but to totally be scared of a power source I don't believe solves anything. People need to become
educated and get involved. Educated informed decisions is the only way we'll solve anything. Yes wind?kills?wildlife, so does hydro, so does coal. What do people want for their power that impact widlife the least (and that doesnt just mean kills,?climate change (no flames from people who are skeptics) also affects all wildlife and energy built on fossil fuels like coal does affect climate change, so people need to determine what has least impact to our planet and wildlife for the power we are going to need. Education its a great thing, informed decisions are our only hope.
?
Scott Downes
downess at charter.net
Yakima WA?

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