Bird Kill Statistics
Note the source of these stats: the US Fish and Wildlife Service, not the wind power industry!
The comparison wouldn’t be quite so extreme in a country with more wind turbines, but the US does produce almost 7% of its electricity from wind.
While cats, windows and vehicles kill a lot of small birds, wind turbines (like overhead electrical cables) are hazardous to bigger birds like geese, swans and eagles. Germany, Spain and probably other countries, unlike Britain, paint red bands on turbine blades – which substantially reduces the hazard to birds. Britain’s white turbine blades are frequently completely camouflaged against a cloudy sky – as is obvious to anyone who travels up and down the northern end of the M6, or the M74.
For large birds, removing overhead electrical cables (by undergrounding them) would probably be more significant than avoiding building wind turbines which currently kill less than 1% of what overhead cables kill. Even if wind turbines increased by a factor of fourteen (to produce 100% of the US’s electricity), they’d still kill far fewer than overhead cables do.
