The number of wind farm kills at altamont pass looks inflated. Other numbers I have seen are around 4700/year. There are 4930 turbines there so this is less than 1 bird/turbine/year. Even at 10000 deaths, that is just over 2 bird deaths/turbine/year. One source estimates that wind power causes
4.27 bird deaths per wind turbine per year overall which seems rather high considering that Altamont is considered a particularly bad case. Since this was identified as a problem at Altamont, wind farms built since tend to use cylindrical towers that the birds can't as easily perch on and use lower speed turbines and the towers at altamont pass are being converted. Between the tower type used, the size of the farm, the turbine type, and its location on a major migratory route, and use of guy wires, altamont pass is considered one of the worst cases.
Another detail that is usually omitted is that the birds that are killed at Altamont are generally predatory birds that perch on the towers and then strike the blades while attacking prey (when not distracted by prey they avoid the blades). So each raptor kill there typically also translates directly to another creature's life saved (not counting future kills by the same bird).
Another site, San Gorgonio, kills an estimated
6800birds annually (based on 38 dead birds actually found) but this is 0.01% of the estimated 69 million birds that pass through the valley annually during migration and was considered "biologically insignificant". At another more recent wind farm with 38 turbines (Vansycle Ridge, OR), estimate was 0.63 birds per turbine per year.
Also often ignored is that other methods of power production and distribution tend to be more dangerous to birds. One USFWS employes estimate, cited by the American Bird Conservancy which is behind the wind vs oil bird kill story, was that 440,000 birds are killed by wind farms in the US; this is higher than other estimates (many of which are an order of magnitude lower, and USFWS itself distances itself from this estimate) but this pessimistic number will be used for comparison. Fossil fuel power plants are estimated to kill 32 times as many birds. Power transmission lines kill 398 times as many birds. Windows on buildings are estimated to kill 220 to 2200 times as many birds. Domestic cats kill 227 times as many birds and feral cats slightly more. Hunting kills 227 times as many birds. Cars and trucks 114-227 times as many birds. Agriculture kills 152 times as many birds and pesticide use 173 times as many. Communication towers kill 9 to 114 times as many birds. Nuclear power kills about a quarter less. And airplanes kill 5.5 times less. These are US numbers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_wind_power#Birds
Nevertheless, the same source says that in 1951 "Fisher, a British ornithologist, estimated there are more than 100 billion individual wild birds in the world," and that Leonard Wing (1956) estimated that there were about 5.6 billion birds in the U.S. in summer and about 3.75 billion in winter. In 1931 McAtee estimated 2.6 billion breeding land birds in the U.S. Obviously these numbers are quite dated and only estimates.
http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/zoo00/zoo00443.htm
Using 4.675 billion birds in the US, wind turbines kill 0.009% per year (National Academy of Sciences puts it at 0.003%). While windows kill 2-21% and the other listed activities kill 15-38%.
There is a difference in how birds are killed by wind and oil. The oil industry is fined for preventable bird and animal deaths resulting from misconduct. The fines in question are due to open pits of oil; covering these pits would not affect the ability to harvest oil. And
charges were dropped back in January after the ABCbirds.org media circus in September. Another source suggests that these ponds actually kill
1973 birds per year that aren't reported by the oil industry.
They are also fined for bird and other animal deaths resulting from oil spills. 6000 birds killed by Deepwater Horizon (recovered bodies, estimated deaths 60,000) and
225,000 (estimate) by Exxon Valdez; not counting other creatures. They are not fined for deaths resulting from collisions with fixed or moving structures including oil derricks, pumps, offshore platforms, or office buildings or vehicle collisions; yet these are probably considerable. They are not fined for their share of the 14 million bird deaths resulting from fossil fuel power plants, or the 175 million deaths from power lines. Or flare stacks;
3000 birds were found dead around a single flare stack in canada in one month. And I ran across a paper that talked about bird deaths from oil slicks surrounding
off-shore oil platforms (which attract birds) but didn't find any mention of fines.
abcbirds stated its bird-smart wind campaign, that promotes regulation for wind industry, in 2010 with a $500,000+ grant from the Leon Levy Foundation (and another $100,000+ grant in 2010. ABC's income was about 6.03million in 2010 and 9.742million n 2011, the year of the wind vs oil grandstanding; that is a whopping 61.5% increase in donations in just one year. Could this have more to do with fundraising and exposure than birds? From their 2010 Annual report, they promote "mandatory regulations" for the wind industry but offer "recommendations" for the oil industry:
Bird-Smart Wind Program Spins into Action: With
support from the Leon Levy Foundation, ABC launched
its major new Bird-Smart Wind Campaign that seeks
to address the hazards to birds posed by the burgeoning
wind power industry. ABC is pro bird-smart wind power,
which requires the industry to abide by mandatory
standards that prevent bird collisions with turbines and
their associated structures and protect sensitive bird
habitats from the expanding wind power footprint.
...
Focus on the Gulf Oil Spill: ABC produced a report on
the spill with specific recommendations to improve the
protection of key nesting areas for resident bird species
in the Gulf of Mexico, and has provided it to the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service and members of Congress.
Recommendations include using better booms to
contain oil and protect nesting islands, and fencing off
critical beach nesting areas to prevent trampling by crews
cleaning up oil in the area. ABC is also spearheading
the raising of resources for multiple partner projects to
restore or create additional habitat in the Gulf region at
key sites for nesting seabirds and wintering shorebirds.
Watch ABC’s Bird News Network video on the Gulf oil
spill at
www.abcbirds.org/newsandreports/video.html.
Oh, and while ABCbirds seems to ignore many threats that kill orders of magnitudes more birds than wind turbines, they seem to have it in for feral cats:
"I detest the killing of cats and dogs or anything else," says George Fenwick, president of the American Bird Conservancy. "But this is out of control, and there may be no other answer."
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...10/03/free-roaming-cats-at-center-of-renewed-health-bird-threat-debate/1600569/
Coincidentally, they got $500,000+ in 2011, the same year as the wind vs oil hatchet job, from the DJ&T foundation that speciallizes in spay/neuter programs.
In a study published late last year, for example, conservation biologists Todd Arnold and Robert Zink found that, “although millions of North American birds are killed annually by collisions with manmade structures, this source of mortality has no discernible effect on populations.”
http://www.voxfelina.com/2012/10/us.../10/usa-today-free-roaming-cats-at-center-of-renewed-health-bird-threat-debate/
Which is attributed to a paper with this abstract:
Avian biodiversity is threatened by numerous anthropogenic factors and migratory species are especially at risk. Migrating birds frequently collide with manmade structures and such losses are believed to represent the majority of anthropogenic mortality for North American birds. However, estimates of total collision mortality range across several orders of magnitude and effects on population dynamics remain unknown. Herein, we develop a novel method to assess relative vulnerability to anthropogenic threats, which we demonstrate using 243,103 collision records from 188 species of eastern North American landbirds. After correcting mortality estimates for variation attributable to population size and geographic overlap with potential collision structures, we found that per capita vulnerability to collision with buildings and towers varied over more than four orders of magnitude among species. Species that migrate long distances or at night were much more likely to be killed by collisions than year-round residents or diurnal migrants. However, there was no correlation between relative collision mortality and long-term population trends for these same species. Thus, although millions of North American birds are killed annually by collisions with manmade structures, this source of mortality has no discernible effect on populations.
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0024708
Oh, and a few snippets:
Eastern North America also has >60,000 communication towers >60m tall and documented kills of migratory birds at individual towers have ranged from 80 to 3,200 birds per year
...
Estimates of total collision mortality from communication towers in North America range from 0.94 to 50 million birds annually [11], [12], whereas estimates of collision mortality with windows range from 3.5 million up to 5 billion birds annually [9], [10], [12]. Using the most frequently cited median estimates of 25 million mortalities from collisions with towers [11] and 1 billion mortalities from collisions with windows [9], these two mortality sources in aggregate represent 21% of the estimated breeding population of 4.9 billion North American landbirds.
...
At one of the longest monitored collision sites, 15,987 ovenbirds collided with a TV tower during a 38-year monitoring period [17], for an average of 420/yr.
Oh, and one mile of high tension power lines results in an estimated
200 bird deaths per year.
When you consider bird deaths from communication towers and transmission lines, wind turbine deaths seem remarkably low.
And this page suggests that even from the perspective of bird safety, ABCbirds campaign is irresponsible as even without any further reduction in bird kills, wind farms are a net benefit to birds:
However, replacing all fossil fuel generation with wind turbines world-wide would save roughly 70 MILLION birds’ lives annually. Wind energy is actually the form of generation with the lowest impact on wildlife. Wind farms kill less than 0.0001 per cent of birds killed by human actions annually, and perhaps 0.00000075 per cent of birds on the planet annually.
...
Fossil fuel generation kills 17 time more birds per gigawatt-hour than wind energy
...
Human causes kill up to 1.5% of birds annually; wind farms kill 0.00000075%
...
It is also worth considering the alternative: more fossil fuel generation. An energy governance study done in Singapore compared fatalities across forms of electrical generation in 2009 and published its results. Wind farms and nuclear power stations are responsible each for between 0.3 and 0.4 fatalities per gigawatt-hour (GWh) of electricity while fossil-fueled power stations are responsible for about 5.2 fatalities per GWh. (Coincidentally, human fatalities per TWh of electricity are roughly 0.4 for nuclear and wind, and roughly 5 for coal according to one study; the very similar ratios between human and avian mortality are striking)
...
It’s also worth noting that while some wind farms kill a few birds per wind turbine per year, many wind farms kill almost no birds or actually no birds per year.
“However, there has been a noticeable absence or low frequency of avian deaths at other wind farms. Kerlinger (1997) conducted a five-month survey at the Searsburg, Vermont Wind Energy Facility and found no fatalities. Lubbers (1988) surveyed eighteen 300kW wind turbines in Oosterbierum, Denmark, and found only 3 fatalities over 75 days, or less than 0.8 per turbine per year. Marsh (2007) found a bird casualty rate of 0.22 birds per turbine year after monitoring 964 turbines across 26 wind farms in Northern Spain. Rigorous observation of a 22-turbine wind farm in Wales documented that it has killed no birds, and researchers found a shift in bird activity to a neighboring area (Lowther, 1998).”
...
Wind turbines have been added to the list of bird killers in recent years. This is not because they kill significant numbers of birds; the worst cases have a handful of birds per turbine per year. According to the best impartial sources, they kill perhaps 20,000 – 33,000 birds annually in the USA. As the US has roughly 20 per cent of the wind generation capacity in the world, assuming 150,000 bird deaths world-wide isn’t unreasonable. Of course, numbers of wind turbines are increasing, but so is siting sensitivity and mitigations (more below). Compared to the roughly 1.5 billion from other sources, this cannot be considered significant. Even 10 times the the number of mortalities – which one anti-wind organisation, the American Bird Conservancy, claims – still makes wind turbines a very small contributor to avian fatalities.
http://reneweconomy.com.au/2012/want-to-save-70-million-birds-a-year-build-more-wind-farms-18274
Maybe this is why the major bird organizations have long been proponents of wind power. The National Audubon Society and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (Europes largest) support wind turbines. While RSPB works at the planning stage to minimize bird kills at wind farms, they support wind energy and even plan to install a wind turbine at their headquarters.
On balance, Audubon strongly supports wind power as a clean alternative energy source that reduces the threat of global warming. Location, however, is important. Many National Audubon Society Chapters and State Programs are actively involved in wind-power siting issues in their communities. Each project has a unique set of circumstances and should be evaluated on its own merits.
http://policy.audubon.org/audubon-statement-wind-power
