Wind turbines shredding Italy's raptors (1 Viewer)

With 6000 of these devices intended for the UK (and that's just the onshore ones) maybe they should be concentrated on the Grouse moors. At least the birds of prey have already been removed..... :C

http://www.examiner.com/x-13344-Wildlife-Conservation-Examiner%7Ey2009m7d26-Italys-birdsofprey-being-lost-to-wind-farms

Im a bit suspicious by the way they seem to be popping up everywhere on this island...perhaps local and national goverments are getting 'incentives' to make sure they are built...

That article doesn't seem to have any scientific evidence to back its claims. It is also illustrated with photos of North American raptors, which makes me question exactly how accurate it is.

No doubt that badly sited windfarms can do a lot of damage to certain bird species, but it is best to judge things on scientific evidence rather than hearsay!

Capercaillie71 said:

That article doesn't seem to have any scientific evidence to back its claims. It is also illustrated with photos of North American raptors, which makes me question exactly how accurate it is.

No doubt that badly sited windfarms can do a lot of damage to certain bird species, but it is best to judge things on scientific evidence rather than hearsay!

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If you had clicked on the link (recent report in Life in Italy.com) that is :-http://www.lifeinitaly.com/node/6774 it shows a somewhat different Italian local view. The inclusion of american raptor species in an american web-site article was probably just due to available pictures at the time.

Roger

rogerscoth said:

If you had clicked on the link (recent report in Life in Italy.com) that is :-http://www.lifeinitaly.com/node/6774 it shows a somewhat different Italian local view.

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I did click on that link and it didn't add any more detail than the original link. A farmer's organisation and some un-named environmental groups say that "huge numbers of birds are already being killed when they collide with the spokes of wind towers in Italy".

It may be true, but it's very easy for someone to set up an 'environmental group' and claim that something is happening with very little evidence. I would prefer to see some stronger evidence that someone has actually been monitoring collisions before accepting these claims at face value.

There's loads of evidence that wind-farms kill birds, especially raptors.


One brief example here;

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/conte...6/art00018;jsessionid=11l7c82559131.alexandra


They even closed a large wind-farm in northern Spain recently because of the numbers of vultures and eagles it was killing (I've looked for the report, but I can't find it). The Spanish government has also banned offshore windfarms in the Strait of Gibraltar because of the threat to migrating birds.

http://www.typicallyspanish.com/news/publish/article_16455.shtml

Some figures from the Times Online article linked below:

"Wind farms are notorious killing grounds for birds, which can easily fall victim to the mills’ 45m blades. Recent figures from Navarra reveal that 7255 birds (including 409 vultures and 432 birds of prey) were killed in 11 wind farms over a 12-month period."

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/travel/news/article4122434.ece

Barred Wobbler said:

There's loads of evidence that wind-farms kill birds, especially raptors.

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I'm not disputing that, but it depends very much on the size and location of the wind-farms.

A badly sited windfarm located in an area with high concentrations of raptors or in a migration bottleneck can do a huge amount of damage as the examples you have given show (not putting windfarms in the Straits of Gibraltar is a no-brainer!). But equally, there are plenty of locations where wind farms will do little or no damage. The important thing is that rigorous environmental impact assessment is carried out and that the results are taken into account when planning the location of windfarms.

My point was that there is insufficient evidence in the linked articles at the start of this thread to determine what the situation really is in Italy. It may be the truth, based on surveys and monitoring, or it may be unsubstantiated assumptions by anti-windfarm lobbyists.

Gib is a bottleneck, granted.

Navarra, where the Times quoted figures come from isn't in a migration bottleneck. It is a region in the north of Spain in the Pyrenees. Typical mountain country.

Part of the problem is that, prior to a wind farm being built, there's a lot of error involved in estimating collisions. General method is to determine that x number of birds pass through area, that y proportion will come into contact with turbines and z proportion will take avoidance action. Evidence suggest that a very high proportion take avoidance action (e.g. 99%-99.99%). Assuming 99% rather than 99.99% avoidance (i.e. <1% difference in avoidance estimate) increases mortality estimate 100-fold.

Explained in detail here (volume also contains lots of other useful info).

When the vertical shaft turbine is producing twice the energy from a smaller profile with no spinning blades why are we not switching to this superior technogy?

Perhaps the article is correct in claiming "the biggest obstacle to switching to this superior technology is greed. There is a lot of money at stake for the manufacturers of the archaic and lethal prop-style turbines. When there are large investments involved, business people can turn a blind eye to ethical or moral considerations".

I'm in two minds about wind turbines. On the one hand I can see how birds may collide with them, but on the other hand I've never heard of a bird colliding with an electricity pylon or radio mast, or even a tall tree.

cheersm8 said:

I'm in two minds about wind turbines. On the one hand I can see how birds may collide with them, but on the other hand I've never heard of a bird colliding with an electricity pylon or radio mast, or even a tall tree.

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A pylon isn't over 400 feet tall, and it doesn't have a 50 metre long blade sweeping across the line of flight at 170 miles an hour every one and a third seconds.

And yet there are still many birds killed by flying into static objects that are hard to accurately get a range on even with binocular vision, such as high tension power lines that often have to have red marker balls put on them to help flying birds avoid them.

I'm certainly very concerned by the exponential growth of these things in Cadiz province particularly near Tarifa. It's scandalous that the long established cranking monstrosities along the coast there haven't been dismantled let alone the construction of so many more (admitedly more elegant examples) around La Janda and elsewhere,

John, when I was there in September they were dismantling some of the old Tarifa turbines on the open construction pylons.

The bad news is that they were building some newer and much bigger ones to replace them.

You'll recognise the view in the photo below, taken from the track down from the venta at La Janda. A small part of the Facinas - Zahara windfarm.

95 turbines (I've counted them) in this shot. In an important staging area for migrants. For those not familiar with the scale of these things, those plants around the bottom that look like bushes are actually trees.

cheersm8 said:

I'm in two minds about wind turbines. On the one hand I can see how birds may collide with them, but on the other hand I've never heard of a bird colliding with an electricity pylon or radio mast, or even a tall tree.

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In Huntsville specifically, there are several radio masts on the mountaintops, and yes, birds do collide with them...even raptors and especially with guide wires coming down from the mast.
The real threat I see is to bats, which seem to have a problem flying behind the wind turbines chasing insects and can't handle the sudden pressure change. Lots of bat mortality. Google bats and wind turbines and I think there are several articles on it.
Collecting dead animals behind wind turbines is fairly easy, but usually the owners don't want you there doing that.

By happy (or unhappy) coincidence this story appears in today's papers.

http://www.journallive.co.uk/north-...-adverts-for-berwick-windfarm-61634-24262787/

It appears that the windfarm developers have been caught telling porkies again and this time the advertising standards agency have given them a hiding for telling lies in their picures of a proposed windfarm in the Northumberland countryside.

"Colin Wakeling, who lives near the site, made the complaints – the first being E.ON used images of turbines in its press adverts that were around half the height of the eight proposed.

The company displayed photographs of its turbines at Oldside wind farm in Cumbria which are 61m high – as opposed to the 115m structures, reduced from 125m, it wants near Berwick.

Mr Wakeling’s second complaint related to a photomontage in a brochure showing views of its scheme from Bowsden, around 7km away. He argued there are communities nearer the wind farm location than Bowsden to whom the turbines will be more visually intrusive."

EOn's defence was;

"A spokesman for E.ON, whose application is to be decided by Northumberland County Council, said: “This is the first time that we have been ruled against by the ASA on a wind farm advertisement. We had no intention to mislead people and were trying to represent how a generic wind farm would look.”"

Well that doesn't cut it for me. "representing how a generic windfarm would look" just isn't good enough.

When I was involved in applications for developments that could have a potentially major visual intrusion into a landscape we made sure that the photomontages etc we used were exactly representative of the way the development would look - we didn't uses a "generic" site, we used mathematical models to show the exact scale of the features - we didn't used half size ones brought in from elsewhere to give a reduced impression.

We also selected our viewpoints to be truly representative of the areas around the development - we didn't pick one sufficiently far away to make it look less significant that in actually would be,

cheersm8 said:

I've never heard of a bird colliding with an electricity pylon or radio mast, or even a tall tree.

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Barred Wobbler said:

A pylon isn't over 400 feet tall, and it doesn't have a 50 metre long blade sweeping across the line of flight at 170 miles an hour every one and a third seconds.

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Literature reviews by Drewitt and Langston suggest that collision rates for windfarms can range from 0.01 - 23 birds killed/turbine/year. Collision rates for overhead power lines range from 2.95 - 489 birds killed/km per year.

There's a lot of variation there but with 26000km of high voltage overhead wires in the UK and about 2500 wind turbines, there are almost certainly significantly more birds being killed by overhead wires than wind turbines.

So two wrongs make a right?

Don't windfarms have overhead lines too? Quite long ones in fact, all the way from the hillsides to the industrial centres?

No, two wrongs don't make a right, you're exactly right. So do two (or more) badly sited windfarms make all windfarms bad? Of course not.

There have, no doubt, been some well documented, badly located windfarms with terible consequences for birds (mostly raptors), but to say that all windfarms are bad for birds is surely niave?

I'd have said that the proposed road through Białowieża forest in Poland would be a disaster for wildlife. So should we ban all road construction?

As Capercaillee says, each site should be assessed on individual merits and based on data regarding bird activity on and around the wind farm site. This is a pre-requisite of any windfarm application in the UK and that's why we have so far had so few bird-windfarm problems here.

I now make my living undertaking detailed assessments of sites for windfarms (for birds, bats and other wildlife), so am speaking from experience. I'm also a lifelong birder and a passionate conservationist (before anyone accuses me of selling my sole to the devil, ask yourself what sort of people should be undertaking these appraisals).

I have looked at dozens of potential windfarm sites on behalf of developers in order to identify bird issues at an early stage. In most case, though admittedly not all, the developers do not proceed with sites that are likely to be problematic. Firstly, it will be expensive for them to undertake several years of intensive survey and secondly, there is a high risk of failing to obtain planning permission due to opposition by Natural England/Scottish Natural Heritage/CCW and the RSPB. In most cases the commercial risk is simply too high to continue with a controversial site, its only the few bad ones (like Lewis) that we generally hear of, and I have objected to those too.

I always feel for the RPSB when I read the (endless) anti-windfarm letters in the birding media. Their attitude is spot-on for this issue; they don't object to the majority og benign applications, but if they are not happy on a site they fight tooth and nail (believe me, I have first hand experience).

So before jumping on the anti-windfarm bandwaggon, ask yourself this. How much evidence is there of real problems in the UK? Very little. You can come up with conspiracy theories if you like, but the truthis that the British windfarm industry, in the main, have acted responsibly on this issue and should be congratulated for doing so.

As a final point, I think it would be fair to say that many opponents of wind farms cite birds as an issue not because of any genuine concern for birds, but because it is another piece of mud to sling against a development that they do not lile for personal reasons.

Criticism based on evidence is fair and appropriate, but quoting spurious data doesn't help anyone.

Fred Fearn said:

I always feel for the RPSB when I read the (endless) anti-windfarm letters in the birding media. Their attitude is spot-on for this issue; they don't object to the majority og benign applications, but if they are not happy on a site they fight tooth and nail (believe me, I have first hand experience).

So before jumping on the anti-windfarm bandwaggon, ask yourself this. How much evidence is there of real problems in the UK? Very little. You can come up with conspiracy theories if you like, but the truthis that the British windfarm industry, in the main, have acted responsibly on this issue and should be congratulated for doing so.

As a final point, I think it would be fair to say that many opponents of wind farms cite birds as an issue not because of any genuine concern for birds, but because it is another piece of mud to sling against a development that they do not lile for personal reasons.

Criticism based on evidence is fair and appropriate, but quoting spurious data doesn't help anyone.

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Although I'm a birder, my main concern is actually not just for the birds (where I accept that the impacts can be acceptable with careful siting). But I strongly object to the wholesale industrialisation of large parts of our remaining open countryside to sustain our greedy and wasteful lifestyle. If we're not prepared to seriously reduce our energy consumption, then we should at least adopt solutions which don't inflict such permanent and widespread damage (even if significant additional costs are involved).

This is particularly important in such a densely populated nation as the UK, where surely we have more reason than most to treasure our diminishing wild areas, rather than see them as a yet-unexploited resource to be readily sacrificed for our benefit. I am continually amazed that so many environmentalists (including, as a general policy, the RSPB) believe this is a 'green' and responsible way forward.

France has proved that it's possible to generate clean energy without such large-scale destruction by much greater use of nuclear energy. Why can't the UK? And we shouldn't hide behind the excuse that waste storage issues etc make it too inconvenient, costly... If we really want clean energy then we should be prepared to do whatever it takes to avoid inflicting such widespread damage on our hills and moors.

Richard