The Bugs Will Love This

Researchers have found that the blades of wind generators are killing enormous numbers of bats. On Backbone Mountain in West Virginia, it is estimated the 44 turbines killed between 1,400 and 4,000 bats in 2004. Large numbers of bat carcasses have been found below wind generating turbines in that state and others.

Meanwhile, turbines continue to kill huge amounts of birds world-wide. It is true the number is less per turbine than in the past, but it is still enormous. And these are typically rare and majestic species.

The wind energy industry loves to say that the number of birds killed by turbines is small compared to the number killed by other sources. True, but I recently learned that the number of people killed by breast cancer is small compared to those killed by prostrate cancer. Oh, well; let’s just adopt the industry’s way of thinking and stop working to eliminate breast cancer. By their way of thinking, all those people killed by breast cancer are unimportant.

Somehow, I’m having a tough time accepting that.

So what are these “other sources” that are killing the birds? Developers of wind farms love to remind us that collisions with buildings, communication towers and other such manmade objects kill many more birds per year than wind generators. True. How could it not be? After all, there are more than 100,000,000 buildings in the United States, and God knows how many communication towers, but only some 16,000 wind turbines. Don’t you love it when they play the facts that way?

If you are interested in the effects these wind farms have on the bird population, dig up a copy of the April 3, 2005 Chicago Tribune and look at page one of the Business section. There you will learn that “Illinois sits beneath the Mississippi Flyway, traveled by migratory birds from as far as the Arctic coast of Alaska to Patagonia at the southern tip of South America.” “Millions” of birds, the article states, fly through our state each year.

Industry experts say they place their behemoths “in areas where they will kill “relatively” few birds. The truth is, some wind farms are located “in places where they border on the murderous.”