Number One Threat to Birds. Hint – it’s not Wind Turbines. March 22, 2011

From the New York Times:

While public attention has focused on wind turbines as a menace to birds, a new study shows that a far greater threat may be posed by a more familiar antagonist: the pet house cat. A new study in The Journal of Ornithology on the mortality of baby gray catbirds in the Washington suburbs found that cats were the No. 1 killer in the area, by a large margin. Nearly 80 percent of the birds were killed by predators, and cats were responsible for 47 percent of those deaths, according to the researchers, from the Smithsonian Institution and Towson University in Maryland. Death rates were particularly high in neighborhoods with large cat populations.

This is, of course, more confirmation of what my own research for a pair of wind energy videos showed.

(I’ve embedded them below the fold)

The article gives the number of birds killed annually by wind turbines as 440,000 (I assume that’s in the US? That’s a much higher number than the National Academy of Sciences study from 2007 that is quoted in the videos. Maybe it’s a global number?) The prediction is for a million bird deaths annually by 2030, as the number of turbines grows.

Anyhow, the number of deaths from housecats? 500 million.

Add to that the the billions more that die from collisions with buildings, wires, cars, not to mention loss of habitat from suburban sprawl, agriculture, and activities like coal mining, the occasional massive oil spill, and of course, the gorilla in the room, climate change, and you can see that Turbines are not the problem – they are indeed part of the solution.

The second video also deals with the problem of bat mortality, which is real, but manageable.