Birds have more to fear from cats than windmills

San Francisco Chronicle:

A long-awaited federal report on the environmental impact of wind power suggests birds have far more to fear from high buildings, power lines and cats than they do from the swirling blades of wind generators at Altamont Pass and elsewhere.

But North America's bats might have plenty more to worry about, according to a report released Thursday by the National Academy of Sciences.

The report said bats might be at considerable risk in the southwestern United States and elsewhere, where reliance on wind power has been growing. The wind-power turbines generate sounds and, possibly, electromagnetic fields that lure the acoustically sensitive creatures into the spinning blades, scientists suggested.

Until Thursday's report by the National Research Council, the research arm of the Academy of Sciences, most of the concern about the environmental effects of wind generators has focused on birds, but the report's statistics showed that wind turbines hardly make a dent in the bird population, which, it noted, faced greater danger from cats and other foes.

In the United States in 2003, wind generators accounted for only three-thousandths of 1 percent of bird killings -- no more than 37,000 birds. That same year, possibly as many as a billion birds died in collisions with buildings, and electrical power lines may have accounted for more than a billion more deaths, the report said. And domestic cats were responsible for the demise of an estimated hundreds of millions of songbirds and other species every year.

...

Not to mention those killed with shotguns by hunters.

This is bad news for opponents of wind energy, but they will come up with another excuse to starve this country of means for producing electricity. For every method their is an objection and that will continue regardless of the merits of those objections.

The NY Times in its search for a new excuse suggested that the windmills will not ower air pollution. You will have to read the story for the convoluted logic.