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dreamcompiler

Number of birds killed annually in the United States by

Wind turbines: 140,000 to 328,000 [0]

Cars: 340 million [1]

Building collisions: 365 to 988 million [2]

Cats: 1.3 to 4.0 billion [3] [4]

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00063...

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/05/29/bird-deaths-c...

[2] https://bioone.org/journals/the-condor/volume-116/issue-1/CO...

[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380

[4] https://www.npr.org/2013/01/29/170588511/killer-kitties-cats...

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"It was not effective at all for willow ptarmigan, ground birds which tend to run into the turbines’ base rather than its blades."

I want to see these numbers. They can't be very high.

Actually, I want to see a new horror flick where the blond protagonist is ambushed by ground birds running into her house. I'm guessing it won't have the same affect as the Hitchcock's

Birdemic might give you what you crave.https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH1SNmY_1XY

Wow.

That movie has the most ludicrously poor mix on the audio that I've ever experienced. I saw it in a theater and the levels ranged from threshold of pain to inaudible.

I thoroughly look forward to revisiting it in this alternative presentation. Thank you for sharing.

I sincerely hope you were hangin' out (hangin' out). Hangin' out with your family in the theater.

A friend of mine has a Birdemic DVD signed by the director as one of his most-prized possessions.

oh man, I thought this was going to be some 80s style schlock, yet the opening shot has a post-2000 Ford Mustang. i'm so confused!!!

> Cats: 1.3 to 4.0 billion [3] [4]

Maybe we should paint the cats…

If nothing else, it’ll be hilarious.

(I’m kidding, don’t put paint on your cats people. You can dye them safely though! Edit: safely for them, you might get hurt)

It's hard enough to get them to hold still on a flatbed scanner -- painting would be a team effort.

You can put a bell around their neck, which apparently reduces their catch by half[1]. The cats usually don't look happy about it though.

[1] https://www.publish.csiro.au/wr/WR09127

I did that to a cat once. Poor thing didn't like it, and started backing up, fast. We were indoors, but it still took several minutes to catch her to take it off. I've learned my lesson and won't try that again.

We belled or cat, she got used to it, completely stopped her catching birds

Maybe people should not let their house cats out, right? We can call the crazy cat lady "crazy" but she wouldn't let her babies out, let's all be more like crazy cat lady.

You need to be very careful with the string/lace/collar you use to attach the bell, it should be strong enough to resist casual attempts to remove it, but not strong enough to not break when some substantial force is exerted on it (weight of the animal).

Single point anecdata, but I once found a cat with a collar that remained stuck in a fence, the cat - attempting to get it off - managed to insert a leg inside the collar and that - with more attempts to get free - made a really deep cut under the armpit, the poor cat was half choked and it took weeks for the wound to heal. .

Please make sure to use a breakaway collar, or the cat could get stuck and die because of it.

It consistently blows my mind how our societies focus on the wrong thing (though painting a wind turbine blade seems pretty innocuous (and shocking it wasn’t done before).

It’s like if someone told you we have a problem with Cara speeding, and their solution is to outlaw Ferraris because they go fast…

It's because people focusing on birds being killed by wind turbines don't actually care about birds, they just don't like wind turbines.

It's a convenient bullet point in a list of tedious to debunk FUD.

> people focusing on birds being killed by wind turbines don't actually care about birds, they just don't like wind turbines.

Are you implying raptor kills in wind turbine farms do not happen and any such criticism is unfounded?

The kind of bird matters.

Wind turbines are often built in areas where raptors hunt, and so the turbines end up killing a lot of raptors. Raptor species have relatively low populations, ranging from a few hundred thousand to a couple million or so.

Most of the species of birds that live in more densely populated areas, which also tend to be where we have more buildings and cars and cats, are much more abundant. Around 80 million house sparrows, for example, around 150 million starlings, and around 200 million house finches.

So even though many more birds die by running into buildings, cars, or cats, in most places in the US those are almost all birds that are so numerous that this has much less impact on their species than the much smaller absolute number of raptors that die running into wind turbines.

Agreed. Also the "cats" figures mostly come from "unowned" feral cats rather than from pets. Which makes them a tougher problem to deal with. I'm sure spaying and neutering policies help but I don't know how much.

There's no question the problem is more subtle than the raw numbers suggest. There's also no question that some factions within the anti-renewable energy crowd misstate the "bird strike" problem deliberately.

I think the main thing is that windmills kill endangered condors and eagles, while cars run over pigeons. Not that cars and cats killing small birds is good...

We live in a countryside and our house has quite large windows which caused a lot of bird deaths in the first year after the house was built. My wife came up with an idea to put plush toys on the window sills to try to scare/warn the birds away. That actually works surprisingly well - I have not seen any dead birds around the house anymore.

A common thing I see used to prevent bird strikes are black - or even better, UV-reflective - predator-shaped window stickers. Or even window protection film (not sure this is the right translation).

Sources about cats doesn't look very scientific to me. Another interesting fact, North Americans cities now have more birds than the same areas had before urbanization because of the abundance of food and lack of predators (other than cats). Also [3] and [4] is the same.

Maybe, but a lot of those birds belong to a small number of species that won the adaptation lottery, like pigeons.

Pigeons are not the sharpest spoons in the drawer, but another name for them is "rock dove". They evolved to live along cliff faces, and to feed simple carbohydrates to their chicks. They can outcompete just about anything in a land full of steep edifices and discarded chips.

Corvids, like crows and ravens, don't do quite as well in cities. They are very smart, but they are scavengers who like to nest in trees, and they need protein-rich food like meat for their hatchlings.

On the bright side, if you live in a city, you can probably befriend your local crows by tossing them a dollar menu burger every now and then. Seriously, they can recognize faces. Try not to make eye contact until they know you.

Re crows/ravens, it depends on the city. In the pacific northwest crows mostly out compete pigeons in urban areas. Ravens have found good homes in semi-rural areas. Hang around Vancouver or Seattle and you will see crows/ravens pushing the eagles around.

Not true about the corvids. They thrive in cities.

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/12/14/1820

"The majority (72%, a total of 424 articles) of the studies reported positive effects of urbanization on corvids."

The astounding claim that cats kill a zillion birds always seem to derive from highly dubious extrapolations from studies of feral colonies.

Because a bald eagle getting killed by a wind turbine has the same impact on wildlife as a pigeon killed by a cat.

Over here [1] it says "least concern" under the bald eagle's conservation status.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bald_eagle

In Juneau, eagles are so numerous that many residents consider them pests because they carry off small pets in one's yard and it's illegal to harass or kill them. They have even entered houses.

Of course they also bring in tourist $$ so the relationship between people and eagles in Juneau is complicated.

Any attitude towards Bald Eagles is about symbolism, not environmental relevance.

I would say the same about attitudes intolerant to any criticism of wind turbines.

Now compare the type of birds.

One of the surprising parts to me from this comment is that there are 4B+ birds in United states alone

What do you think eats all the insects and fish

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