Scientists study wind-farm risks to birds
By Hal Bernton, Seattle Times, June 6, 2010 [here]
GOLDENDALE, Klickitat County — Biologist Orah Zamora spends her days walking around wind turbines in search of dead birds and bats. Most of her surveys turn up nothing, but every once in a while she finds a carcass that may have been felled by a whirring blade.
“It’s like a crime scene, and you try to figure out what happened. Sometimes, it’s really obvious because you see a slice mark,” Zamora says.
Zamora’s monitoring at the Windy Flats project is part of a larger series of surveys to assess how the wind-power boom is impacting birds that must now share air space with the towering turbines. …
One survey at Big Horn Wind Farm in Klickitat County estimated that more than 30 raptors were killed during an initial year of operations — more than seven times the number forecast in a pre-construction study. The dead raptors included kestrels, red-tailed hawks, short-eared owls and a ferruginous hawk, which Washington state lists as a threatened species. …
Based on that information, the wind-power turbines currently operating in Oregon and Washington kill more than 6,500 birds and more than 3,000 bats annually.
In an era of climate change and a massive oil spill off the coast of Louisiana, wind-power advocates say these deaths are an acceptable trade-off for development of a renewable energy source. …
These Altamont wind farms have consistently killed more raptors per megawatt of power than anywhere else in the nation. Despite efforts to modify these wind farms, surveys indicate the Altamont wind farms still kill more than 1,600 hawks, eagles and other raptors annually… [more]