Ecotretas writes in with this sad video.
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First time I’ve seen an image of a big bird going down due to wind energy:
The important part is at 1:57 This occurred in Creta.
The effort to save the bird is notorious! Please check it out at:
and
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This video made me wonder why the vulture was hanging around these wind power turbines. Perhaps there were other birds felled by the turbines on the ground and the vulture just did what they do normally: circle and wait.
That was awful !!
Very sad !!
This is sadly a problem here in Norway as well. Some birds have totally vanished from the areas where they put up windmills. 🙁
But i guess it is okay when it is done in the name of global warming/climate change/or whatever they call it today.
Someone linked to that recently – it’s been around for a while.
I think it demonstrates just how rare an actual bird strike would be. How many times did it fly through the rotor without being hit?
OT but I hope interesting.
Is Google biased?
A year ago my colleague and I did an analysis of popular climate blogs based on Google ‘page rank’. The page rank goes from 0 to 10. The higher the rank the more enquiries Google is likely to send to that site. What we have found is the while non-sceptic sites are more or less in balance, as many sites have moved up as have moved down, for sceptic sites this is not the case. The number of demotions is more than 5 times higher than the number of promotions.
(http://www.climatedata.info/Discussions/Discussions/opinions.php )
It is not due to changes in posting frequency. We have also found that non-sceptical sites with few visitors (according to Alexa) sometimes have the same page rank as popular sceptic sites with 100 times as many visitors.
It seems as if Google is biased against climate sceptics.
Solve the “climate crisis…” kill an innocent birdie. 🙁
The WWF will save the birds.
cough
Worst form of energy production EVER!
“Windmill parks are a renewable form of production of electric energy. They produce cheap ….(CHEAP!!!)….electric energy, reducing the pollution…(POLLUTION!!!)… of the environment and the greenhouse effect. ”
Drinking the Warmist KoolAid: cheap energy indeed.
Well, at least they’ll save that particular bird.
Look for learned studies on the disappearance of large numbers of soaring birds from their usual habitat, all blaming it on Global Warming.
Oddly enough, they’ll be correct…in a very skewed way.
Very sad.
The only way these Greens/CAGW prophets of doom will be stopped is by being put on the stand and cross-examined by the best legal brains in the US or England.
None of their so called “evidence” nor any of their models will stand up to cross-examination by lawyers. Why are those of us who know better not engineering ways in which the CAGW farce can be exposed in Court?
Senator Inhofe is the only person I am aware of presently who is actually making threatening noises. Can we not get public interest type suits going somewhere? Are there any lawyers listening. I am prepared to get involved pro bono in England.
Anybody?
Kevin Oram
Colateral Damage…
In the war against fossil fuel addiction: Clean Energy 1, Vultures 0
Time to stamp another vulture outline on the side of the turbine tower. After 5 kills, the tower becomes and “ace”.
Steve – no. of crossings is less relevant than time in the area to a strike.
More about Birds
http://www.wind-watch.org/news/2009/07/05/northwest-wind-power-a-threat-to-raptors/
http://www.examiner.com/ExaminerSlideshow.html?entryid=455213&slide=3
This is what Audubon et al wants to do, trade our environment for wind power, so they can enrich their own coffers because of their “gullible and naive” green followers.
http://www.sunjournal.com/node/808976
This is a great slide show, by a wildlife biologist, to show how wind turbines impact our environment. This is what the Audubon society and other “environmental org’s are begging for, thousands upon thousands of these.
http://www.kutztown.edu/acad/geography/wildlife&windconf/Speaker_Presentations/Boone_GIS.pdf
The nuclear plant that is supplying my electricity now, (certainly not a wind farm, there is No Wind Today), puts out 2400 MW , 24/7 almost 365 per year.
5,000 (five thousand) 2 MW turbines with yearly ave capacity of 25% will put out 2,500 MW of erratic, unreliable electricity. The turbines will need about 20,000 acres of clearcut forest, impacting many times more of that forested area by FRAGMENTATION. That is what the Audubon et al used to preach about. Now they are lobbying congress to clearcut massive areas of prime ridge habitat in the Northeast US, because that is where the wind blows. It is complete “insanity” to think that we should cover our environment, our most precious resource, with these costly, wasteful, noisy MONSTERS. The bird kills are a small part of a picture that is overall DEVASTATING to anyone who cares about the land we live on. Another enormous consideration is the how these affect the lives and land values of people who live within 2 miles of these things.
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That was horrible. What a magnificent animal. I had heard that windmills killed birds but that video stopped my heart.
It’s a vulture, a carrion eater. It was undoubtedly employed by an oil company, whose employees are all just vultures feeding off the corpse of a dying planet!
*sobs*
[/sarcasm]
Shorter 30second clip here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9srPoOU6_Z4
Re: Steve Schaper (11:43:48) :
I think it demonstrates that their was something about the turbine that attracted the bird. Whether it was carrion near the windmill or something else I dont know, but it was obvious that the vulture was going to keep on flying around the turbine and the longer it did the more inevitable the strike.
“I think it demonstrates just how rare an actual bird strike would be. How many times did it fly through the rotor without being hit?”
If we are going to base it on the video alone, I would say that one large bird gets hit by a windmill every 2 minutes or so. At that rate, it’s 262,974 birds hit per windmill per year. How many windmills are there? 😉
I was wondering whether the turbulence generated by the windmills disturbs the wind pattern that the bird expects , creating updrafts and sinks its little brain cannot compute. Many birds depend on just planing rather than flying, taking advantage of the wind patterns.
Re: Steve Schaper (11:43:48):
One other thing. If you assume that the bird flew past the turbines 50 times then that would mean 1 in 50 birds flying through a turbine would get hit. That is of course a ridiculous extrapolation to make from a single piece of data. Similarly, it is also ridiculous to assume that strikes would be rare from a single piece of video.
An ecological consultant of my acquaintance (who was studying the impacts of wind turbines on birds) has seen the same behaviour with Australasian harriers in New Zealand, although in that case the bird didn’t collide with the blade. Harriers do scavenge, but this didn’t seem to be a case of a bird hanging around waiting for casualties, and I suspect the same applies to the vulture. It’s almost as if these raptors like to show off their flying skills – whether they’re trying to impress the ladies or just enjoying themselves, who knows? It does seem that wind turbines have some kind of appeal for at least some raptors, although just how common this behaviour is I’m not sure.