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One issue that annoys RE zealots, like a burr under a frisky pony’s saddle blanket, is the wind industry’s rampant bird and bat slaughter. It’s an inconvenient truth to be sure. But, as with everything that the wind industry does, if you can’t keep a straight face while lying about it any more, then pull out all stops and cover it up.

The wholesale slaughter of millions of birds and bats – includes rare, endangered and majestic species, like America’s iconic bald and golden eagles. The default response from the wind industry is to lie like fury and – when the corpses can no longer be hidden and the lying fails – to issue court proceedings to literally bury those facts (see our post here).

The hackneyed retort from the wind cult is that cars, cats and tall buildings kill more birds than their beloveds.

Attempting to compare an utterly pointless power generation source – abandoned centuries ago for very obvious reasons, that wouldn’t exist without massive and endless subsidies – with automobiles and skyscrapers is risible.

Motorcars and high-rise buildings both serve useful purposes, providing meaningful and independent mobility to the masses and permitting the high levels of urban density needed for modern cities. Whereas, wind turbines provide power in occasional, chaotic spurts – delivering power less than 30% of the time, at totally random intervals – require their entire generating capacity to be matched by dispatchable sources, such as coal and gas, and accordingly serve no meaningful purpose, other than harvesting endless subsidies.

And for all the talk about cats killing more raptors than wind turbines, try and find a single verified account of a moggy bringing down a healthy Wedge-Tailed Eagle, Hawk or Kite.

Now, as to the fate of such raptors, an Indian study has detailed the appalling scale of the wholly unnecessary carnage, and what it means for the ecosystem, as a whole.

Wind farms are the ‘new apex predators’: Blades kill off 75% of buzzards, hawks and kites that live nearby, study shows

Daily Mail

Harry Pettit

6 November 2018

Wind turbines are the world’s new ‘apex predators’, wiping out buzzards, hawks and other carnivorous birds at the top of the food chain, say scientists.

A study of wind farms in India found that predatory bird numbers drop by three quarters in areas around the turbines.

This is having a ‘ripple effect’ across the food chain, with small mammals and reptiles adjusting their behaviour as their natural predators disappear from the skies.

Birds and bats were assumed to be most vulnerable to the rise of the landscape-blotting machines.

But their impact is reverberating across species, experts warned, upsetting nature’s delicate balance.

The news is particularly worrying as most wind farms are built on wide open plains and other environments where birds are typically found.

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru studied lizard and bird populations at three wind turbine sites in the Western Ghats.

They found almost four times fewer buzzards, hawks and kites in areas with wind farms – a loss of about 75 per cent.

In areas without turbines around 19 birds were spotted every three hours, while nearer to the machines this number dropped to around five.

This led to an abundance of the fan-throated lizard, a species only found on the Indian sub continent and a favourite snack of the predatory birds.

The reptile also had lower levels of the stress hormone corticosterone and this changed how it lived.

For instance, humans were able to get much closer than usual before they ran off, as without predatory birds around, they had become less fearful.

The analysis has implications for wind farms all over the globe – including Britain, where the top predators include many birds of prey such as owls and eagles.

Study coauthor Professor Maria Thaker said: ‘We have known from many studies that wind farms affect birds and bats.

‘They kill them and disrupt their movement. But we took that one step further and discovered that it affects lizards too.

‘Every time a top predator is removed or added, unexpected effects trickle through the ecosystem.

‘What is actually happening here is the wind-turbines are akin to adding a top predator to the ecosystem.’

The study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution compared populations of raptors and lizards on a plateau that has had a wind farm for around 20 years to an adjacent valley that has no turbines.

It also took blood samples from 144 lizards captured on the two locations in the northern area of the mountain range.

Wind turbines are known to kill large birds, such as golden eagles.

A recent study by an international team of scientists found the decline of apex predators is ‘arguably humankind’s most pervasive influence on the natural world.’

These include wolves and lions on land, whales and sharks in the oceans and large fish in freshwater ecosystems.

There have also been dramatic falls in populations of large herbivores like elephants and bison. The trophic cascade has moved down the food chain.

Daily Mail