Here in California, the wind farm at Altamont Pass has become synonymous with bird kills. However, a lot of good work has been done as a result to study the bird mortality, and figure out how to design and operate the turbines to minimize the threat to birds. They have torn down the most lethal turbines and replaced many with much larger, slower, and taller turbines, with greater clearance between the blades and the ground. What's more, they disable turbines in the winter, when energy production is lowest and bird mortality was highest.
As a chemist and an environmentalist, I know that everything we do to extract energy from natural resources has an impact on the environment. I know that the coal-burning plants that we can idle, thanks to development of renewable energy sources, have a huge benefit for the environment, not just the birds, but for the entire ecosystem. No energy source is without its downsides. By conducting research into the risks presented to birds by wind farms, evolving designs, and careful siting, we can do far more good than harm by developing wind energy.
In the US there is an ongoing embarrassing story of opposition to offshore wind farms off the New England coast by wealthy locals who don't want their view of the horizon at sea cluttered while they're out sailing in their yachts. These same people are ardent environmentalists, until doing the right the thing has some noticeable negative impact on their own lives. It's an understandable reaction, but it seems terribly selfish for the neutral observer. I sometimes feel the same embarrassment at the tone of the reaction of the birding community to the development of wind farms.
I wish, instead, that bird lovers would insist on careful review of wind farms with respect to bird mortality, impacting design, siting, and operating hours. The wind farms that turn out to be blunders for wildlife preservation can be taken down, as they were in Altamont Pass. To insist that all wind farms everywhere are an unacceptable abomination doesn't serve the cause of wildlife preservation as much as a more balanced and reasoned approach. It also doesn't serve the far bigger problem, namely, the challenge of finding a sustainable way to maintain the presence of some seven thousand million people on this overworked planet.
