> Birds of prey in Africa experiencing population collapse, study finds > new research used road surveys to find that nearly 90% of the 42 raptor species studied had experienced declines, with more than two-thirds showing evidence of being globally threatened.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/04/birds-of...
If the people involved in this conversation actually cared about birds, they wouldn't be worried about either. They'd be worried about cats. Cats kill about 20-55% of the entire US bird population every single year. Somewhere between 1.3B and 4B birds per year in the US alone. [1] And an order of magnitude more small mammals (6.3B - 22.3B).
It's several orders of magnitude more than turbines and oil-and-gas drilling combined.
Studies put the number of birds killed by wind turbines in the US at 140K-690K. That's 0.0035% to 0.05% of the birds killed by cats. It would literally be a rounding error nobody would ever notice if all the wind turbines came down.
I honestly can't believe we're still having this conversation in the context of wind power. Put some UV stickers or black paint on them and move on. [3]
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380
[2] https://www.denverpost.com/2019/09/20/bird-population-decrea...
[3] https://group.vattenfall.com/press-and-media/newsroom/2022/b...
UK December wind generation: Generation: 2.6 TWh Subsidy/MWh : £86.68 Market Price/MWh: £75.00
Older projects were subsidised much more but around half the current wind capacity has been built from 2016 with far less subsidy.
Humans eat 8 Billion chickens per year in the US alone: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22287530/chicken-beef-fac...
Some 15 MegaKilos of chicken: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/chicken-c...
My windows, on the other hand, take out a few every year.
Really though, I know the term "bird brain" exists in my North American lexicon but birds aren't THAT dumb. They can fly around large, opaque, moving objects with a rather high degree of accuracy.