Every on-land wind project requires a permit to kill eagles from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). These permits are based on an offset program in which eagle deaths are supposedly offset by saving the lives of other eagles by making power poles safer.
In a recent study I found that this offset program is not working. See the report here: https://www.cfact.org/2025/06/29/cfact-report-feds-fail-to-offset-wind-turbine-eagle-kills/
It turns out that failure to verify that this offset program is working is a deep violation of FWS’s own regulations. The regulations passed in 2016 clearly contemplate the possibility of offset program failure and require the FWS to track program effectiveness. FWS has done no such thing.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is not in compliance with its own permitting regulations, so permitting should stop until compliance is achieved. Existing permits to kill eagles should also be declared invalid, since they are based upon an offset practice that has not been shown to work and cannot work in its present form.
The offset program is called compensatory mitigation because the wind project owner pays to mitigate the eagle deaths caused by its project. The money is used to make power poles safe from electrocuting eagles, supposedly in numbers of eagles that are equal to or greater than the number killed by the project.
The permitting regulations require FWS monitoring of the effectiveness of compensatory mitigation, which they have not done. It is the law.
Here are the relevant regulatory requirements. The eagle-kill permits specify the required compensatory mitigation actions and measures:
“Section 22.220 Compensatory mitigation
(b) All required compensatory mitigation actions must:
(4) Use the best available science in formulating, crediting, and monitoring the long-term effectiveness of mitigation measures.
(7) Include mechanisms to account for and address uncertainty and risk of failure of a compensatory mitigation measure.”
The Regulation’s Environmental Impact Statement spells it out in more detail:
“Compensatory mitigation must be based on the best available science and must use rigorous compliance and effectiveness monitoring and evaluation to make certain that mitigation measures achieve their intended outcomes, or that necessary changes are implemented to achieve them.”
Even though the Regulations specifically refer to the risk of failure, FWS has done no effectiveness monitoring of the compensatory mitigation measures. Given that approximately 30,000 wind turbines have been permitted to kill eagles, this is noncompliance on an enormous scale.
Moreover, as I explain in my report, it is virtually certain that the compensatory mitigation program is highly ineffective. Here is why:
“The likely cause of this failure is FWS’s use of a wildly inaccurate electrocution death rate. As a result, the number of power poles made “safe” is just a tiny fraction of what would be required to create a legitimate offset. While FWS currently requires about 278 poles to be “made safe” per wind-killed eagle, the correct number, according to the results presented in this report, may be closer to 67,000.”
If FWS wants to use an offset program for wind turbines killing eagles, it must first do the research to establish the effectiveness of the offset measures. The present program is based on a single small 2010 study, with results so extreme as to be questionable.
This research must be done before offsets can be used to permit wind power killing eagles under the Eagle Protection Act. As things stand, FWS is deeply violating its own permitting regulations.
Fire all top Fish and Wildlife managers starting with those in charge during the Biden administration. I’d say no less than 25 of the top people should go with no severance and their retirement and benefits cut in half. This kind of crap will stop next week.
My experience with F&W folks here in Wokeachusetts is that they have common sense and work hard for wildlife- BUT- they love their jobs,so they do whatever the politicians demand- so it’s not the professional F&W folks that are the problem but the political cadre ruling over them.
That is why I try to protect the employees at the middle and lower levels.
My experience is that USFWS has failed at everything they ever undertook or intended. The employees may be saints, but failure is failure is failure. From eagles to spotted owls, from frogs to finches, from louseworts to lichens, every lifeform they touch goes extinct in no time. The USFWS is a blight upon the Earth, a poisonous mistake, a catastrophe of mega proportions. Cancel it, erase it, throw it in the burn barrel.
There should not be ANY offset program.
Wind turbine owners should bear the total cost of all fines and jail penalties for destroying these wonderful birds.
They KNEW it was going to happen, but went ahead with the wind turbines regardless.
https://youtu.be/D8ZYhTog7oc?feature=shared
Wind turbines do to eagles what the IPCC Climate Liars have done to climate science.
Coincidence?
Put “climate science” in quotations or (climate) in parenthesis.
By declaring there is such a thing as “climate science,” you are augmenting the credibility of the climate activists.
The study of climate is an actual science, even though the Climate Liars have sullied it with their pseudoscience.
How about using the left’s favorite weapon: a nationwide injunction stopping all wind permitting until the FWS can PROVE existing permitted farms are in compliance with the LAW.
All it takes in and Executive order and or a push from top executives to individual agencies to comply with law.
Unfortunately Trump’s nominee to head FWS is still awaiting confirmation after 3 months. The acting head was FWS chief of staff under Biden so I am waiting for the Trumper.
in principle they should cancel all eagle kill permits issued since 2016 or when they began using the offset program. But the Feds would owe $100 billion in damages for shutting down all those turbines.
What’s in their burn bag files?
“These permits are based on an offset program in which eagle deaths are supposedly offset by saving the lives of other eagles by making power poles safer.”
“There are an estimated 316,700 bald eagles in the lower 48 states, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (2020 data).”
If they kill 316,698 eagles they should only need to make 1 power pole safer?
I thought about it more… 300k seems like a lot, I remember as a kid hearing there were less than 100 California condors is the 1980s. So what qualifies a creature to be called endangered?
“A species qualifies as endangered when it’s facing a high risk of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range, due to factors like habitat loss, overexploitation, or other threats. Specifically, the Endangered Species Act (ESA) defines an endangered species as one in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range.”
What a wishy-washy mess. So I wondered, what are the top 10?
“Rhino.
Gorilla. …
Saola. …
Vaquita. …
Sunda Tiger. …
Yangtze Finless Porpoise. …
Turtle.”
Ok if number 1 most endangered is rhino (not in the USA South though) then how many rhinos are there?
“There are roughly 27,000-28,000 rhinos left in the world across all five species.”
Fewer rhinos than eagles, but still way more than I shared any college apartment with. Next question on my mind would be how long would it take to achieve zero rhinos with a US military sized budget and conventional weapons only? AI was not helpful there, though if I were not on “the list” before…
Fact checked my own condor memory…
“There are approximately 561 California condors remaining in the world. As of 2022, the population consisted of 347 birds in the wild and 214 in captivity. ”
WTF! How are 27k rhinos on the most endangered list if there are less than 350 condors! I must be looking at it the wrong way.
“The northern white rhino is widely considered the rarest animal in the world, with only two individuals remaining. These are both females, Najin and Fatu, living at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. The species was declared functionally extinct in 2018 with the death of the last male. While scientists are working on ways to potentially revive the species through artificial insemination, the northern white rhino is currently on the brink of extinction. ”
Ah that’s better (worse I guess). My 10 most endangered list got confused by lumping all rhinos together. AI programmer’s gonna have to work on that.
Bald eagles are not endangered. These regs are under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act which prohibits killing any eagles. The Golden is most threatened as there were just an estimated 30,000 in 2016. FWS has made no estimate since then which is part of the noncompliance I am pointing to. We have no idea how much damage the 30,000 or so turbines erected since then have done.
Thanks. 30k sounds pretty good.