Last month I are posted on:
HOW IMPORTANT ARE BIRDS?In summary, I reported:
* There may be up to 400 billion birds on Planet Earth.
* In the U.S. alone:
* Cats kill half a billion birds/year.
* Glass windows: almost a billion
* Traffic: 100 million
* Electrical transmission lines: around 174 million
* Agricuture: 67 million
* Wind turbines kill around 250.000, or 0.050% as efficiently as cats.
* If some day wind power increases by a factor of ten, that would equal 2.5% of cat kills.
* If some day solar farms produce as much as electricity as wind farms, all those facilities would amount to 10% of cat kills.
* Should we eliminate cats from our society? There are 74 million to 96 million cats as pets in the U.S., and 70-80 million dogs. Dogs aren't as capable as cats in reference to birds.
* Fossil fuel power plants kill ten times more efficiently than wind farms.
* Windows and buildings kill tens times more birds than cats. We certainly won't stop using windows nor constructing buildings.
"Well, Susan Kraemer of RENEWABLE ENERGY NEWS" just reported:
* There are 5 billion small passerines ("song birds") in North America.
* Somewhat fewer than a quarter million passerines collide annually with wind turbines in the USA and Canada.
* This is about 0.01% of the population of passerines.
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* 30% of passerines (right") annually die of natural causes.
* However, the size of windmills has changed from the faster-turning small kW turbines of the 19080's to the 1-3 MW turbines of today, which are out of the hunting range of raptors, but lower than the migration corridor of small passerines.
* Bird kills have accumulated from the earlier days. Latest studies show less of an effect on birds.
"However, two of the three comments to that article indicated:
* The study was paid for by the American Wind Energy Association, which is a clearly biased organization.
* Raptors (right--eagles, hawks, etc".) do get killed by wind turbines, and their reproduction rates are much lower than passerines.
So, maybe this issue will continue to hinder solar and wind farm development.
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