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Comment by lenkite | Hacker News Reader

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I have trouble believing you are being honest. Piling under wind turbines?! I have yet to see a dead bird under a wind turbine myself (but I acknowledge they do kill some). Published estimated averages are 4 to 18 birds per turbine per year [1]. Compare that to buildings (where we also don't pile up either) which kill man estimated 1 billion birds a year [2]

[1] https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/wind-power-bird-de... [2] https://abcbirds.org/news/bird-building-collisions-study-202...

Yes, explicitly piling up under wind turbines. This was in the Western Ghats in India and my mother was sickened - (she used to be a regular trekker before Covid). I didn't initially believe her either. Btw, they were so effective as bird killers that wind-turbines were even acknowledged officially as "top predator". They change ecology drastically within a couple of years.

“Our central discovery is that wind turbines can act as top predators, by reducing the density and activity of birds, their prey are now released from the typical level of predation. This release causes a range of changes in lizards,” explained Dr Maria Thaker of Centre for Ecological Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science

https://iisc.ac.in/wind-farms-are-the-new-top-predator-in-th...

> so effective as bird killers that wind-turbines were even acknowledged officially as "top predator"

This is using "top" in the sense of "apex", because turbines have no natural predators. The paper says you could imagine them as something at the top of the trophic web. The paper explores the impact on their prey populations.

That's opposed to "top" in the sense of "kills more than other predators" or whatever. I mention it because number-of-kills is what the rest of the discussion seems to be about.

> This was in the Western Ghats in India

Climate change in the subcontinent is going to kill way more birds and wildlife. You think oil and gas drilling or coal mining is better for them?

You haven’t, which is why you have no citation just a ridiculous, unproven anecdote. There are literally hundreds of turbines in my area, there are not and have never been “birds piling up under them.”

Your own link further down estimates 4-18 per year. 1 bird per month would be gone before you had a chance to collect it, much less have a chance to “pile up”.

I am honestly surprised - you should see dead birds at-least a couple of times a week. Not annually or monthly, but weekly esp for a full wind-farm like what you are stating.

Which part of the world do you live in ? It is possible that the location of the farm was chosen wisely. Are you also sure someone is not clearing the corpses ? There are laws mandating the collection of corpses in many western nations. My personal anecdotal opinion is that data is more honest in the non-Western nations since nobody cares about bird-deaths all that much and so the deaths are not sanitized.

The entire US? I’ve been to Hawaii and hiked under turbines, no dead birds. I’ve been hunting in the midwest in fields, no dead birds.

I’ve been hiking in Europe, no dead birds.

Again, where is your citation? If birds are “piling up” they’re should be countless articles on it. Hell BP alone would GLADLY fund studies showing all these birds deaths to justify selling more oil.

> My personal anecdotal opinion is that data is more honest in the non-Western nations since nobody cares about bird-deaths all that much and so the deaths are not sanitized.

that was funny

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