5 ms·

Yeah, apparently just paint one rotor blade differently to make it stand out and birds will stay clear [1] Maybe Starlink constellations will be an incentive t

• heavyset_go 6y ago
  > Yeah, apparently just paint one rotor blade differently to make it stand out and birds will stay clear [1] The study you're citing was only studied 4 wind turbines, while the evidence does point towards this working, I wouldn't say that the existing evidence is conclusive. Also, the turbines with the darker blades still killed birds, just less bird than the turbines with standard blades.
  • biotinker 6y ago
    Wind turbines don't kill enough birds to be more than a drop in the dead-bird bucket. It's a talking point used by people who were looking for reasons to be against wind turbines, but housecats kill four orders of magnitudes- not 4x, 10,000x- more birds each year. The percent of human-caused bird deaths due to wind turbines is smaller than the percent of Americans dying in airplane crashes each year, compared to all US deaths each year.
    • heavyset_go 6y ago
      I agree, but I disagree about the claims that were made by the poster whose post I was responding to.
    • mschuster91 6y ago
      The species of birds that get killed are different. Wind turbines kill bigger birds, cats kill small songbirds. Both are a non-negligible factor for their respective species.
      • adgjlsfhk1 6y ago
        Windmills generate more than 1% of power. Thus if you scale up the wind turbines by 100x (to cover more than all power generated over the world), they still kill over 100x fewer birds than cats.
    • ffggvv 6y ago
      seems disingenuous to compare the raw numbers of deaths when windmills still aren’t very common but you want to make them far more common. not saying i disagree with your point overall but not a fan of that stat
    • titzer 6y ago
      Well judging from your comment it's going to be hard to get your default attitude to change on this. What would change your mind? A popular mechanics article? https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a24749526/turbines-apex-predator-study/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a247495... Turbines are bad for birds. Period.
  • bawolff 6y ago
    So, paint is cheap. Its not like we're talking a multimillion dollar mitigation. Lets paint some turbines and see what happens.
• agumonkey 6y ago
  That would be smart of spacex to allocate some profits to do these projects. win-win business orientation