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I love the way non-issues get pushed forward, this reminds me of when I was on a campus board and they were considering banning dangerous bicycles from within the campus because they might hit a pedestrian.
I then asked
"How many people have been hit or injured by bicycles on campus since formation?"
To their knowledge no one ever did get hurt by a bicycle riding through campus.
This issue is EXACTLY the same, try finding the so called studies that say these devices cause large numbers of bird deaths, of the few there are none that are done by anyone of sigificance under decent controls. It seems to me they should state, what, when, where, how high and how many as that is rather important. Also its important to compare, for example far more birds die a year crashing into nuclear and into coal power plants and other high buildings, perhaps we need to ban all high buildings and all coal and nuclear plants with high towers because they kill millions of birds a year as compared to maybe 28 birds a year on a turbine? Heck millions of birds a year die on highways, perhaps we need to ban cars?
Most who complain are the it might do that and we can't risk it.
Why not ask some of the larger operators how many dead birds they find around their turbines when doing maintenance? In the case of the Fennimore installation the caretaker said he couldn't remember any dead birds around their turbines. Perhaps birds aren't as dumb or as plentiful as we think around turbines?
You know it isn't that hard to stake one out and count. I know at least 4 birds a year die on our front picture window, we find them in the flower bed below, not rocket science.
Perhaps these people need to stop worrying and look before they *****. Things aren't as bad as they think, at least in regard to wind turbines.
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