Ecotretas writes in with this sad video.
===========================
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
=========================================
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.
I read once there was an average of one large bird killed per windmill per month (or maybe year). Thing is these blades are deceptively slow moving but are really going pretty fast. 30m long is a circumference of 200m which if it goes around in 3sec is 66m/s or much much faster than a car.
Steve Schaper (11:43:48) :
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
Steve, if you watched the video with a more open mind you would notice that the bird was attracted to these big wings and was destined to be clipped by a rotor. He appeared to be have come from afar and was attracted over. Perhaps the wind currents (these birds are experts on this) were interesting to it. It got a nice acceleration when it passed through the airstream.
Not good for biodiversity. It even selects the bigger birds.
Let’s not go to far here. If these things made technological and economic sense I would be arguing that the occasional bird strike is a small price to pay to power civilization. Unfortunately, they don’t – that is why they are a dumb idea – not because they kill some birds. Every source of power has similar type issues, e.g. fish, etc.
Perhaps there were updrafts it was sailing on?
And than another thing strikes me, this was most likely a place rarely visited by people because it is a barren hill/mountain top, ideal for wild life, and look at it now, apart from the windmills, look at the roads leading to it, the waste and rubble left behind. And this is happening all over the world.
Is this the greener and prosperous earth that is being promised by the Warmista’s if we act as they say we should?
Unintended consequence of knee-jerk environmentalism, combined with politics and greed.
I didn’t watch the video.
It’s all in the name of finding renewable and clean sources of energy. Fortunately for the world but unfortunately for the AGW control freaks, all of that will change soon due to a breakthrough in physics. A new analysis of the causality of motion reveals that we are immersed in a huge ocean of clean energy, lots and lots of it. It turns out that, contrary to the popular doctrine, Aristotle was right and that motion requires a cause. As a result we are moving in an immense lattice of energetic particles. No lattice => no motion.
http://rebelscience.blogspot.com/2009/09/physics-problem-with-motion-part-i.html
Physicists do not understand motion even if they think they do. In the not too distant future, we’ll have vehicles that require no wheels, travel at tremendous speeds and negotiate right angle turns without slowing down and without incurring any damage due to inertial effects. Floating sky cities, New York to Beijing in minutes, earth to Mars in hours; that’s the future of energy and transportation. Wait for it.
Several years ago, Univ. of Calgary was studying the effects of the reduction of bats down by Pincher Creek (large wind farms down that way). News coverage….nothing. Have a few ducks land on a tailings pond at Syncrude…world coverage….
well done on publishing this horrow story. I wrote about it in my London Sunday Telegraph column last month, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7437040/Eco-friendly-but-not-to-eagles.html
“TerryS (12:34:48) :
I think it demonstrates that their was something about the turbine that attracted the bird.”
Vultures, eagles and other large birds of prey circle tall structures. It gives them a sense of coordination and direction. They used to do it with just mountain peaks, then buildings erected by men, and now we see them colliding with windmills. You can’t tell them not to circle the structures, it’s their nature to collect bearings this way.
one wonders how much greenhouse gas was emitted due to the efforts to save the bird? Extra juice for the x-ray machine, bandages, splits and other disposables that were manufactured somewhere, couple bags o’ vulture snacks, extra shift at the vulture rehab centre, and whatnot.
probably makes that particular windmill “carbon neutral.”
Must to read:
The hidden fuel costs of wind generated electricity.
http://www.clepair.net/windsecret.html
The impact of wind generated electricity on fossil fuel consumption.
http://www.clepair.net/windefficiency.html
sixwings (13:03:54) :
Aye, right! Perhaps you would care to elaborate on that or let us know which newspaper you found it in two days ago.
I’m sure we haven’t yet plumbed the full depths of our knowledge of physics but I can’t see this being practical anytime soon!
Here is a bit about those bird Cuisinarts:
http://www.wind-watch.org/news/2009/01/07/bird-strikes-lead-to-delays-in-wind-turbine-projects/
“Split Atoms,”
-not Birds” oops.
well done for writing about this horror story of our time. I reported on it in my London Sunday Telegraph column last month.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7437040/Eco-friendly-but-not-to-eagles.html
Mark Duchamp of Save The Eagles International is one of the real heroes of this story. A retired French banker. he retired to Alicante in Spain, where he came to admire the local eagles and other birds of prey. He was then horrified to see the damage being done to them by proliferating local windfarms. He has since become the most effective campaigner against this worldwide tragedy.
Consult his website at
http://www.iberica2000.org/es/Articulo.asp?Id=1228
Sad & not even necessary, since until electricity can be reasonably effectively stored, wind turbines don’t even save CO2, or so I’ve read. Fabrication, virtually 100% back up needed from conventional, inefficient loading of back up plus inefficiencies of ramping output up and down, as yet uncertain maintenance costs, etc.
I guess hydrogen production then fuel cell use might be the future answer?
At present, the rush to wind power seems one of the worst aspects of AGW panic, financed in UK by hidden levy on all electricity users.
Happy to be corrected if wrong.
“It’s a carrion eater”
Obviously it was attracted by the corpses of the 21,914.5 birds that that turbine had felled over the previous month.
Clearly we need to ban these horrible bird slaughtering machines before the global avian population is wiped out.
anna v (12:39:59) : This post shows quite clearly how the airflow is disturbed by wind turbines.
http://waweatherscience.com/recent-news/winds-turbines-produce-clouds-and-a-loss-of-efficiency/
The article also shows how this wake turbulence drastically reduces the output of the downwind machines.
For those with strong stomachs, pics of birds chopped up by wind turbines: click
[Skip the first & last links, they load Word for just one picture.]
While birds getting hit by windmills is a real problem I suspect this video is a fake video.
Why?
If you watch the video closley at 1.45-1.55 you can see that the camera moves a little bit to the left and the bird follows the camera and is moved closer the windmill the seconds before it gets hit.
I think it is a trick and possibly the bird got shot and then the video got adjusted afterwards to make it look like it got hit by the windmill.
AGW has lernt me one thing, dont belive everything that is shown or told.
Steve Schaper (11:43:48) :
“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?”
Or maybe the bird was attracted to the swirling blades like they are to other swirling vultures then such strikes might be more common for vultures. I have no idea though, just speculating.
Besides Al Gore’s Holy Hologram (13:12:45) answer to “why”, there was also a high cliff, producing most certainly a nice current. Even paragliders were there for it.
@ur momisugly christooher booer (13:11:23) : Yes, that’s your story and thanks for it, and to R North. That’s where I got the story and video for my own tiny blog, and it is somehow circulating indeed. The idea of bird kills by wind turbines is conceivable as long as you don’t see it, then it becomes unthinkable.
This bird flew regularly with these men. They did not expect the bird to fly in to the turbine blades, but it was temped by the warm updraft, as that is what vultures love to ride.
The wind plant offered them no help. They worked hard to save this poor bird. Supporting wind turbines is insane. We are destroying what we are suppose to be saving.