5 ms·

We don't know how many birds die in structural collisions

25 points by chmaynard 2y ago

Terr_ 2y ago
For folks at home thinking about their windows: Apparently one issue is that windows may mirror the outside environment to birds, appearing as portals to more open-space and trees, especially if you include ultraviolet light which humans can't see and which the glass wasn't designed to pass-through. So there are a variety of products advertised for home usage that stick to the outside of the window to make it appear more like a barrier, often semi-transparent to us but more-opaque in ultraviolet to birds.
- LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
  Simpler solution. Simply not cleaning them. No more birdie bam then, because they see immediately what's ahead. No more dread about smashed beaks, brains and broken wings. Birdie sings, joy it brings!
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    With apologies to Roald Dahl (The Twits): That evening, the Roly-Poly Bird flew round and round The Big Red House singing out, "There's sticky dirt stuff all over the pane! If you fly at the surface, you'll damage your brain! So fly away! Fly away! Do not crash! Or you'll finish up tomorrow in a cold Bird Mash!"
klabetron 2y ago
[flagged]
keeptrying 2y ago
I have to leave my windows dirty so the damn birds stop smacking into it. Furrows the brow of my wife up quite a bit.
- oulipo 2y ago
  you can also put (bird) stickers on them, so they see the window and they avoid it
  - keeptrying 2y ago
    The window has too nice a view to ruin unfortunately.
  - Lorean1 2y ago
    Bird stickers unfortunately don't work, birds don't recognize them. Something like "anti collision dot stickers" will work though if the spacing between the dots is not larger than recommended.
    - aeonik 2y ago
      Bird eyes are more sensitive to UV light than humans right? Better UV reflective coating would help them? Or a transparent film with a pattern of absorbed and reflected UV?
pvaldes 2y ago
The subtitle is revealing: [We don't know how much birds kill the windmills so] "This makes it a weak argument against windmills" "We don't know how much, so it may not happen, or is not so relevant as we think, but is repeated by ideology", is a nasty trick. Nice smoke curtain. Specially when is joined later with: "it is true that all humanmade structures are technically bird killers, but..." Either it happens, or it does not happen. We aren't talking here about a sparrow crashing against a window. What we do know is that carcasses of big raptors, vultures, storks, other birds, and even bats can be found near the windmills basis often, in a distribution that is not aleatory. Even if we never achieve to calculate an exact value (before the corpses are quietly removed by foxes or companies) we can identify that there is a problem here. As predators are scarce (by definition) and some are endangered, the impact on populations is not negligible. Killing endangered species is illegal. It does not matter If is "just one" or "just a few" eagles.
- throwaway290 2y ago
  > Killing endangered species is illegal. It does not matter If is "just one" or "just a few" eagles. Great logic! Let's ban skyscrapers and any windows that do not pass through UV. Use one in your house? Illegal.
  - pvaldes 2y ago
    But the biggest fallacy in this PR stunt is that outrageous "we don't know, nothing to see here": Windmill company ESI Energy LLC, guilty of killing 150 bald and golden eagles in 8 USA states [1][2] [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/wind-energy-company-pleads-guilty-least-150-eagles-killed-us-rcna23360 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/wind-energy-company-ple... [2] https://www.justice.gov/usao-edca/pr/esi-energy-llc-wholly-owned-subsidiary-nextera-energy-resources-llc-sentenced-after https://www.justice.gov/usao-edca/pr/esi-energy-llc-wholly-o... > Use one in your house? Illegal I'm curious, how much bald eagles crashed against your house windows lately?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
_y5hn 2y ago
We simply put up post it stickers where birds usually crashed in our windows. There's way less crashes and dead birds after that. Think how many birds crash during a year, and how many houses and buildings with windows there are. You can also buy bird stickers to put up.
- throwaway290 2y ago
  Harder to do with one of those glassy skyscrapers. the ugliest and probably the deadliest for birds kind
  - aziaziazi 2y ago
    What is hard about it? They rope themselves everywhere around it to clean it up. Even a basic robot can put stickers. An even easier and cheaper way is to require it for new constructions.
emptiestplace 2y ago
Earth at Night in Colour S01E05 touches on this.
aaron695 2y ago
[dead]
_yb2s 2y ago
This author has no idea what they are talking about- we have extremely high quality data on bird kills from wind farms. Teams of wildlife biologists literally walk the farms everyday identifying kills, and they have other teams that plant fake kills as experimental controls, to accurately quantify exactly the rate that kills are missed, and correct for that. This whole process is required by law, and there are a lot of wildlife biologists that do this work. You cannot operate a wind farm without quantifying its impact on protected species.
- lutorm 2y ago
  But it seems that the principal objection to these counts is that birds don't necessarily die on impact but may travel quite far before succumbing to their injuries, so the counts necessarily result in an underestimate of the true effect. Are you saying the area that's surveyed is large enough that this isn't true?
  - _yb2s 2y ago
    I’m certain these studies are able to estimate those other deaths and consider factors beyond just carcasses on the ground, because I am personally close to a biologist that works on this, but I don’t know exactly how they do it. The author here seems to be incorrectly extrapolating research statements on static buildings to windmills, when the latter is much more researched.
    - vouaobrasil 2y ago
      That seems like something very far from a certainty. Imagine if you were to cite this in a scientific paper: "a close friend of mine does this but I have no idea how they do it". What about this [1]: > We show that the use of the ORNIS 1%, the 5% mortality criterion, and potential biological removal criteria are inadequate for providing safe thresholds with respect to the impact of wind turbine collisions on populations. From a paper entitled "Mortality limits used in wind energy impact assessment underestimate impacts of wind farms on bird populations". 1. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.6360 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.6360
amelius 2y ago
Deep learning to the rescue ...
pornel 2y ago
It's annoying that there's interest in these stats mainly as an argument against renewable energy, not from perspective of wildlife preservation. Just those particular birds are precious, not the others killed by other man-made structures, pollution, and habitats destroyed by expansion of agriculture. I'd like to see not just more precise numbers of birds lost to wind energy, but the environmental and societal costs of not having the wind energy. Fuel extraction and processing has its environmental impact too. Lack of affordable energy (fuel poverty) costs human lives too. How many human lives are harmed to save a bird from a windmill?
- mcv 2y ago
  Yeah, it's kinda weird, the kind of people who are suddenly pretending to be into wildlife preservation. If they were honest about it, they'd also look into bigger bird killers like high rise buildings, powerlines, cars, domestic cats. Also, climate change disrupting ecosystems is unlikely to be good. But it's probably a good idea to build wind farms outside major migratory routes.
ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
I used to work in an upper floor of a suburban office park "mirrored-window" building. Every day, we'd have bloody smears on the glass.

25 points by chmaynard 2y ago

For folks at home thinking about their windows: Apparently one issue is that windows may mirror the outside environment to birds, appearing as portals to more open-space and trees, especially if you include ultraviolet light which humans can't see and which the glass wasn't designed to pass-through. So there are a variety of products advertised for home usage that stick to the outside of the window to make it appear more like a barrier, often semi-transparent to us but more-opaque in ultraviolet to birds.

LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
Simpler solution. Simply not cleaning them. No more birdie bam then, because they see immediately what's ahead. No more dread about smashed beaks, brains and broken wings. Birdie sings, joy it brings!
- Terr_ 2y ago
  With apologies to Roald Dahl (The Twits): That evening, the Roly-Poly Bird flew round and round The Big Red House singing out, "There's sticky dirt stuff all over the pane! If you fly at the surface, you'll damage your brain! So fly away! Fly away! Do not crash! Or you'll finish up tomorrow in a cold Bird Mash!"

klabetron 2y ago

[flagged]

keeptrying 2y ago

I have to leave my windows dirty so the damn birds stop smacking into it. Furrows the brow of my wife up quite a bit.

oulipo 2y ago
you can also put (bird) stickers on them, so they see the window and they avoid it
- keeptrying 2y ago
  The window has too nice a view to ruin unfortunately.
- Lorean1 2y ago
  Bird stickers unfortunately don't work, birds don't recognize them. Something like "anti collision dot stickers" will work though if the spacing between the dots is not larger than recommended.
  - aeonik 2y ago
    Bird eyes are more sensitive to UV light than humans right? Better UV reflective coating would help them? Or a transparent film with a pattern of absorbed and reflected UV?

pvaldes 2y ago

The subtitle is revealing: [We don't know how much birds kill the windmills so] "This makes it a weak argument against windmills" "We don't know how much, so it may not happen, or is not so relevant as we think, but is repeated by ideology", is a nasty trick. Nice smoke curtain. Specially when is joined later with: "it is true that all humanmade structures are technically bird killers, but..." Either it happens, or it does not happen. We aren't talking here about a sparrow crashing against a window. What we do know is that carcasses of big raptors, vultures, storks, other birds, and even bats can be found near the windmills basis often, in a distribution that is not aleatory. Even if we never achieve to calculate an exact value (before the corpses are quietly removed by foxes or companies) we can identify that there is a problem here. As predators are scarce (by definition) and some are endangered, the impact on populations is not negligible. Killing endangered species is illegal. It does not matter If is "just one" or "just a few" eagles.

throwaway290 2y ago
> Killing endangered species is illegal. It does not matter If is "just one" or "just a few" eagles. Great logic! Let's ban skyscrapers and any windows that do not pass through UV. Use one in your house? Illegal.
- pvaldes 2y ago
  But the biggest fallacy in this PR stunt is that outrageous "we don't know, nothing to see here": Windmill company ESI Energy LLC, guilty of killing 150 bald and golden eagles in 8 USA states [1][2] [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/wind-energy-company-pleads-guilty-least-150-eagles-killed-us-rcna23360 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/wind-energy-company-ple... [2] https://www.justice.gov/usao-edca/pr/esi-energy-llc-wholly-owned-subsidiary-nextera-energy-resources-llc-sentenced-after https://www.justice.gov/usao-edca/pr/esi-energy-llc-wholly-o... > Use one in your house? Illegal I'm curious, how much bald eagles crashed against your house windows lately?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]

_y5hn 2y ago

We simply put up post it stickers where birds usually crashed in our windows. There's way less crashes and dead birds after that. Think how many birds crash during a year, and how many houses and buildings with windows there are. You can also buy bird stickers to put up.

throwaway290 2y ago
Harder to do with one of those glassy skyscrapers. the ugliest and probably the deadliest for birds kind
- aziaziazi 2y ago
  What is hard about it? They rope themselves everywhere around it to clean it up. Even a basic robot can put stickers. An even easier and cheaper way is to require it for new constructions.

emptiestplace 2y ago

Earth at Night in Colour S01E05 touches on this.

aaron695 2y ago

[dead]

_yb2s 2y ago

This author has no idea what they are talking about- we have extremely high quality data on bird kills from wind farms. Teams of wildlife biologists literally walk the farms everyday identifying kills, and they have other teams that plant fake kills as experimental controls, to accurately quantify exactly the rate that kills are missed, and correct for that. This whole process is required by law, and there are a lot of wildlife biologists that do this work. You cannot operate a wind farm without quantifying its impact on protected species.

lutorm 2y ago
But it seems that the principal objection to these counts is that birds don't necessarily die on impact but may travel quite far before succumbing to their injuries, so the counts necessarily result in an underestimate of the true effect. Are you saying the area that's surveyed is large enough that this isn't true?
- _yb2s 2y ago
  I’m certain these studies are able to estimate those other deaths and consider factors beyond just carcasses on the ground, because I am personally close to a biologist that works on this, but I don’t know exactly how they do it. The author here seems to be incorrectly extrapolating research statements on static buildings to windmills, when the latter is much more researched.
  - vouaobrasil 2y ago
    That seems like something very far from a certainty. Imagine if you were to cite this in a scientific paper: "a close friend of mine does this but I have no idea how they do it". What about this [1]: > We show that the use of the ORNIS 1%, the 5% mortality criterion, and potential biological removal criteria are inadequate for providing safe thresholds with respect to the impact of wind turbine collisions on populations. From a paper entitled "Mortality limits used in wind energy impact assessment underestimate impacts of wind farms on bird populations". 1. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.6360 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.6360

amelius 2y ago

Deep learning to the rescue ...

pornel 2y ago

It's annoying that there's interest in these stats mainly as an argument against renewable energy, not from perspective of wildlife preservation. Just those particular birds are precious, not the others killed by other man-made structures, pollution, and habitats destroyed by expansion of agriculture. I'd like to see not just more precise numbers of birds lost to wind energy, but the environmental and societal costs of not having the wind energy. Fuel extraction and processing has its environmental impact too. Lack of affordable energy (fuel poverty) costs human lives too. How many human lives are harmed to save a bird from a windmill?

mcv 2y ago
Yeah, it's kinda weird, the kind of people who are suddenly pretending to be into wildlife preservation. If they were honest about it, they'd also look into bigger bird killers like high rise buildings, powerlines, cars, domestic cats. Also, climate change disrupting ecosystems is unlikely to be good. But it's probably a good idea to build wind farms outside major migratory routes.

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago

I used to work in an upper floor of a suburban office park "mirrored-window" building. Every day, we'd have bloody smears on the glass.