You have a study there where they looked at bird deaths before and after painting a wind turbine blade black btw. Quite interesting.

The population in the area has been increasing. We know that the wind turbine sometimes kill eagles. But now that we aren't actively hunting them to extinction anymore, it seems like accidents like that has negligible impact on the total population.

I'm guessing (my personal opinion) that if the deaths is under a certain threshold, it's made up for the balance of hunter/prey. If some hunter animal dies, the prey population goes up, which helps boost the hunter population again.

Wind turbines is something which causes a death here and there. Similar to anything else in nature that can kill birds. Not something that obliterates an entire ecosystem. Given that you don't build them directly on top of nesting areas of course.

That said, I would LOVE to see more high quality studies on this topic. The more data the better. We should not accept serious long term compromises like we have with the oil and gas industry.

Wind turbines can be near perfect. We can put radar and camera systems on them to turn them off when birds come nearby. We can paint them in a way that birds see them better. We can make them from better and more sustainable materials. We can work on recycling of them. And since everyone, both environmentalists and the oil lobby, is pushing for wind turbines to be perfect to be acceptable, we're continuously moving in the right direction.

The answer you seek is in the second (short!) paragraph.

> But a new analysis of American data, published in Environmental Science & Technology...