The extirpation of eagles from Scotland (windfarms again) (1 Viewer)

[Katy Penland]

I still don't understand why Bush hasn't made it the patriotic thing to develop cars that run on a fuel that the US can control. I'd have thought 9/11 and the recent rises in oil prices would have helped him do this.

Short answer: Because his family and his familiy's Saudi friends aren't in the non-oil business.

 

[Tyke]

I can't see any alternative to some nuclear generation either. Of course windfarms are somewhat easier to decomission after 50 years when we really crack nuclear fission, or solar generation.

Yes it looks like nuclear is the only big player in electricity just now.They need to get on with it if they are going that route. You can't build a nuclear power plant very quickly.

Wind Farm decommissioning should of course include all the infrastructure if the damage to the local environment is to be mitigated. Just carting the turbines away and leaving the approach roads, concrete bases, cable ducts , oil spills etc is not decommissioning. Bet ya that's what they do though. They will be the Industrial "Heritage" sites of the 21st Century.

Colin

 

[Tyke]

Might be some time till a wind farm at Romney Marsh can have an effect on eagle populations. In fact I'd say if it did we'd have plague proportions of them.

Eagles are not a feature of the Romney Marsh landscape-so what is the point of this remark?

The elements which constitute the Romney Marsh Landscape, and their priceless value are eloquently set out in post #1 of the Romney Marsh thread:-

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1602269,00.html

Reading Simon Jenkins' piece again & shuddering at the pointless vandalism to be inflicted on this place , I wondered if somewhere in the RSPB a realisation dawned that the Government has just driven a steam roller over their policy on wind farms.

Colin

 

[walwyn]

Short answer: Because his family and his familiy's Saudi friends aren't in the non-oil business.

I thought I'd replied to this earlier but may have pressed the wrong button (I was tag teaming with a coleague on an internal thread at work). Anyway much of the US price hike in fuel prices is due to refining capacity, which has been cut in recent years:
http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/energy/pr/?postId=5110

I believe that the practice is known as gouging in America:
http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/energy/pr/?postId=5084&pageTitle=New+Study+Finds+Oil+Company+Profiteering+Behind+Gasoline+Price+Spikes%3B+Bush+Called+Upon+To+Prevent+Profiteering

but so far they have been unwilling to call it.

 

[walwyn]

A British commentator John Brignell, has the following thoughts about wind farms, most notably the one just approved for Romney Marsh, in Kent.

Brignell's great isn't he! One of the best. I particularly like this one from his website:

If anything is more shocking than that secret letter from the Royal Society to the media it is the lack of reaction to it.
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/2005 May.htm#conspiracy

A conspiritorial secret letter to the media no less. Wonderful stuff.

 

[Edward woodwood]

unfortunately my post about loony brignell was deleted thx to Mark's cross posting

if u r interested just google his name and take yer pick

you'll laff all nite

Tim

 

[walwyn]

unfortunately my post about loony brignell was deleted thx to Mark's cross posting

if u r interested just google his name and take yer pick

you'll laff all nite

Careful now you'll be accused of pillory.

However, I'd like to know what Mark thinks about one of John Briignell's other campaigns - spraying the worlds wetlands with DDT?

 

[Mark Duchamp]

Colin the question being debated on this thread is will wind farms result in the extirpation of eagles in Scotland. Patently they will not. Even if they were rather foolishly put in every WTE territory in the UK. There is more liklihood that climate change will have an impact.

What do you make of the low and declining productivity of Scottish WTE in comparison to Norwegian birds? Are they just unlucky?

You are basing WTE productivity in Scotland on the figures quoted by the promoter's consultant for the Eishken project on Lewis.

1) These figures are not to be extrapolated to the rest of Scotland

2) On Mull, for example, productivity figures are comparable to those in Norway

3) The interest of the Eishken consultant was to show a low productivity. He did the same for golden eagles, then concluded:

- g.eagles are not reproducing in sufficient numbers at Eishken
- Eishken is therefore a population sink for GE's
- we will feed carrion to g.eagles away from the turbines
- we will therefore convert the windfarm area from a population sink to a population source for GE's.

The flaw in his reasoning was double, and I exposed it in my objection:

"As mentioned earlier, golden eagle productivity surveys covering 22 years are disregarded. Yet they show that the eagles from the windfarm site are excellent breeders: 0.58 fledged per recorded range. This compares with 0.32 for the Harris and other Lewis eagles (Table 9.6).

The author uses instead his own 2-year survey that yields 0.16 - a rate that is clearly insufficient to maintain a population, but permits the promoter to allege that the IBA is a population sink for golden eagles.

Assuming the surveyors were doing their job without malice, what could possibly explain a drop from 0.58 to 0.16?

The answer may be: disturbance of the eagles by human presence. For windfarm projects cause a sudden flurry of activity in once serene wilderness: engineers and technicians move across vast areas, at and around the site. Off-track vehicles take people to heretofore-undisturbed bird habitats - and we can't even be sure that helicopters are not used. Ornithologists survey the land on foot, looking for protected bird species and for eagle prey; they search for eagle nests, check the presence of eggs, monitor flights and breeding success.

In the circumstances, it is not surprising that the eagles, which are extremely shy of human presence, would experience more reproduction failures during those years.

Thus, the poor breeding success of the last 2 years find a logical explanation: the windfarm has started to victimize the eagle population long before the first turbine is installed.

And then we read this phrase: "In 2004 more than 10% of the ranges, in which eggs were laid, were subject to thefts or burning of the nest" (parag. 9.75).

So we have to add a criminal element to the plight of the eagles on Lewis. This is all very disturbing, giving a new dimension to this tragedy of eagles to be killed illegally by wind turbines, but with the approval of SNH and the Scottish Executive. "



I know this is about GE's, and we are discussing WTE's. But the statistics you are using are taken from the same EIA for the same area. So the disturbance factor, and/or consultant bias, would apply.


Finally: the WTE population in Scotland has been satisfactorily expanding in the last few years, GW notwithstanding. The imminent danger for them is windfarming, not GW. Windfarms in Germany, Norway, Sweden and Japan have been killing WTE's. GW hasn't.

SNH is not objecting to windfarms in WTE territory. With only 32 pairs of WTE's in Scotland, and thousands of turbines to come, the danger of extirpation is not "nonsense": it is very real. So real that Malcolm Ogilvie, who advises SNH on such issues, exerted pressure on PROACT to have them remove the word "extirpation" from our petition to Brussels. - If SNH had thought the petition on extirpation was "nonsense", they would have let it self-destruct. The European Commission does not have the reputation of acting based on "nonsense".


Mark :gn:

 

[Jane Turner]

Eagles are not a feature of the Romney Marsh landscape-so what is the point of this remark?

The point was the thread is about the possible impact of wind farms on Eagle populations and the quotes was about Romney Marsh.

 

[Edward woodwood]

So real that Malcolm Ogilvie, who advises SNH on such issues, exerted pressure on PROACT to have them remove the word "extirpation" from our petition to Brussels. - If SNH had thought the petition on extirpation was "nonsense", they would have let it self-destruct. The European Commission does not have the reputation of acting based on "nonsense".


Mark :gn:

oh so funny...

Malcolm asked them to remove it to retain some credibility... isn't that obvious to everyone?

 

[Jane Turner]

2) On Mull, for example, productivity figures are comparable to those in Norway

Do you have the figures to hand Mark?

 

[Mark Duchamp]

Do you have the figures to hand Mark?

I´ll look up in my handwritten notes for you.

Mark

 

[Mark Duchamp]

sadly not

where will montane endemics in Peru/Philippines go to?

And where did they go 1000 years ago, during the Medieval Warm Period? And 70,000 years ago, during the Ipswichian interglacial? This is not a unique situation we are facing: it happened before, but you and Jane are hell-bent on whipping up a scare to sell us your junk.

And junk it is: wind turbines don't do the job. The Dutch are about to dump them, after having spent much money, killed many birds**, and ruined part of their landscape.

**28 birds/turbine/year say their latest study (that would represent 28 million birds per year for 1 million turbines worldwide).


“The VVD (Conservative Liberals) have had reservations about this plan
for much longer, especially because wind energy does not make
traditionally existing production redundant and will simply drive
Holland to more expensive electricity supplies.”

http://www.nos.nl/nos/artikelen/2005/10/art0000E00600A9.html
...........
..........

Climate change is patently a greater threat to WTE survival. Don't fall into Mark's trap of villifying wind farms for everything

To all: this is a lexicon for reading Tim's posts (and sometimes Jane as well):

- by "patently", Tim means: "I have no arguments to oppose Mark's, so an adverb shall do".

- by "falling into the trap", he means "falling into sin". Windfarms are a religious symbol for him: he told us many times already that their value was that of a symbol; it did not really matter if they saved on C02 or not. Remember, friends?

And my use of the word "religion" is no exaggeration: see the excellent letter about the new priesthood and power, which I posted a couple of days ago, and which is also available here:

http://www.iberica2000.org/documents/EOLICA/WINDFARM_NEGATIVE/SACRIFICE.doc


Mark

:gn:

 

[walwyn]

Nothing from Mark on Brignell's campaign to restart spraying DDT over wetlands then ...
http://www.birdforum.net/showpost.php?p=449222&postcount=427

interesting!

 

[Grousemore]

Nothing from Mark on Brignell's campaign to restart spraying DDT over wetlands then ...
http://www.birdforum.net/showpost.php?p=449222&postcount=427

interesting!

Perhaps he's trying to stay on-topic. Why don't you try it sometime?

 

[walwyn]

Perhaps he's trying to stay on-topic. Why don't you try it sometime?

Cough, cough.

Did I post a rant about windfarms in Kent in a thread on Eagles in Scotland, by someone who thinks that we should be spraying DDT over the worlds wetlands?

Perhaps I should post bits out of Cervantes, or something from this:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/052156686X/ref=sib_dp_pt/002-8855603-6444005#reader-page

would that suite?

OTOH perhaps you should take a rest from peering down a telescope, and broaden your angle of view on some subjects.

 

[Grousemore]

OTOH perhaps you should take a rest from peering down a telescope, and broaden your angle of view on some subjects.

You should try it sometime, it would get you out in the fresh air; a lot healthier for you than sitting by a computer and Googling with yourself all day.

 

[walwyn]

You should try it sometime, it would get you out in the fresh air; a lot healthier for you than sitting by a computer and Googling with yourself all day.

Thanks. I'll bear that in mind next time I'm staring out of a tunnel entrance.

 

[Mark Duchamp]

Do you have the figures to hand Mark?

White-tailed eagles on the isle of Mull (from my handwritten notes taken on location this late summer):

7 breeding pairs fledged 8 young in 2005.

Prey: rabbits and hare, sea-birds (especially fulmars), fish, lambs (dead or live?), corvids, feral cats. (I don't have the complete list, nor the percentages, nor even the descending order - does anyone on this listserv?).

In spite of the competition with a large number of golden eagles, and the alleged lack of fish and sea-birds (your personal theory, Jane), and the disturbances by people, WTE's seem to be doing well on Mull.

In Scotland, as far as I know, WTE numbers have grown to 35 breeding pairs from 32 last year.

Where is your alleged GW-linked food shortage, Jane?

Personal note: I find it satisfying that WTE's would control the numbers of corvids to some extent (so do golden eagles). Ravens and crows (please someone correct me if I am wrong), are hurting birdlife when in large numbers (robbing nests). And I have seen a great many of them in Scotland, possibly as a result of man's influence (garbage, roadkills, lambing).

Controlling the numbers of feral cats is also a plus. And if they could too the population of american minks (on Lewis for instance), that would be wonderful.

I have seen sea-gulls take-off en masse when a WTE appears in the sky. This would indicate that WTE's go for them as well. And that kind of prey (like corvids or feral cats) is nowhere near disappearing, on the contrary. So I think you can forget about your theory, Jane.


Added thoughts:

Eagles, like other top predators, are nature's best friends. They keep prey populations healthy while controlling their numbers. They do the same with smaller predators (up to and including foxes in certain countries - dunno if they take them in the UK: does anyone know?).

As a bonus - for our enjoyment of nature - they confer to wild lands a special quality that is fast disappearing from our planet: the feeling of wilderness.

Scotland is about to lose it all, for siting its windfarms in the best eagle habitat: Western Isles, Isle of Skye, Argyll (including Mull). All with half-hearted opposition from SNH and establishment ornithologists (to say the least).

As for RSPB, it is only fighting a few projects where critiques have hurt its image. - Too little too late!
It bears the heaviest responsibility in the unfolding drama, for it is supposedly:

1) politically independent

2) the number-one advocate for birdlife in the UK (and possibly the world, for having such a large membership).

I am weighing my words.


Mark

 

[Jane Turner]

Where is your alleged GW-linked food shortage, Jane?

On its way if the seabirds continue to decline - forcing a breeding season feeding habit change Mark.

Still a little below what WTE should be achieveing, but a great deal better than the Lewis figures you quoted Mark.

Personal note: I find it satisfying that WTE's would control the numbers of corvids to some extent (so do golden eagles). Ravens and crows (please someone correct me if I am wrong), are hurting birdlife when in large numbers (robbing nests). And I have seen a great many of them in Scotland, possibly as a result of man's influence (garbage, roadkills, lambing).

There are a couple of threads on here dedicated to the fallacy that controlling corvid numbers has an affect on the breeding populations of smaller birds, and much as I'd like to be able to blame cats, there is also no evidence that they have the slightest effect on breeding populations. In predator-prey relationships its always the other way round - the level of available prey species controls the populaion levels of the predators. Domestic cats are a theoretical exception since they would not starve or fail to breed if their prey declined.