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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Barred Wobbler" data-source="post: 3302410" data-attributes="member: 69394">And yet the 1988 vintage turbines built on the Spanish migration bottleneck on the Strait of Gibraltar at Tarifa, when they are being taken down, are replaced on the same hillsides and ridges by newer, bigger wind turbines that are still being erected at this moment. There is a lot of false information being spread about the dismantling of wind farms at 'inappropriate sites' with no mention from their apologists of their replacement on the same sites by even bigger bird-chopping subsidy harvesters, nor of the expansion north-west in the past 7 or 8 years of several hundred new turbines on the migrant-rich area of La Janda, stretching in an almost unbroken line over more than ten miles, straddling the entrance to the Ojen Valley and down past Facinas to the sea at Zahara de los Atunas. It's an on-going disgrace, yet all we hear about are the older even less efficient turbines being removed, never the rapid and extensive expansion of their bigger replacements.Sophistry abounds in the industry.First photo below taken last month (9th September) from a point on the coast two miles east of Tarifa town, looking north. Some of the old turbines that attracted so much criticism in the past about their being badly-placed are being dismantled in the bottom left of the photo. Their replacements, erected in the past three or four years and still ongoing are everywhere else in the shot, bigger and taking up a larger footprint that the old 'inappropriate' ones. That photo is taken at the peak of the autumn migration. The closest turbine is static, with feathered blades. The rest are turning as usual.The second photo is of white storks rising from their resting area at La Janda, looking over Tahivilla towards the western end of the Ojen Valley just beyond Facinas, an important migration corridor. The fields beneath the windfarms are hunting areas for thousands of Montagu's harriers, marsh harriers, booted and short-toed eagles and other raptors on migration. Before the wind farms were built in the last decade's rush for wind they were touted as a good place to see little bustards.If you want to look at the extent of the damage, just go to Google Earth and look at the area west of Facinas towards Zahara - all built in the past ten years, a period when we are told the industry has 'learnt the lessons of the past' and improved its act.</blockquote>

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