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Making Wind Farms Safer for Birds
New technologies could help protect birds from turbines
© Becky Matsubara
Climate change poses a big threat to all life on earth, and birds are no exception. Garry George is the director of the Clean Energy Initiative for the National Audubon Society, and he says that wind turbines are essential to meet our carbon reduction goals. But they can also kill birds. Garry and his team at Audubon provide guidance on how to make wind farms safer for birds.
BirdNote®
Making Wind Farms Safer for Birds
This is BirdNote.
[Bald Eagle calls]
Climate change poses a big threat to all life on earth, and birds are no exception. Garry George is the director of the Clean Energy Initiative for the National Audubon Society, and he says that wind turbines are essential to meet our carbon reduction goals. But there’s a catch.
Garry George: Turbines do kill birds. Birds can fly into them. Those blades are spinning really fast. But there are ways to avoid that, to minimize that.
Garry and his team at Audubon provide guidance on how to make wind farms safer for birds.
Garry George: The first, best way, is to not put them in places where there's lots of birds.
[Bald Eagle calls]
For wind farms that are already built, new technologies that detect birds and temporarily shut off turbines as they pass through, could help protect big species such as eagles and condors that are at high risk of collisions.
Garry George: We're pushing it to be tested for Whooping Cranes, for instance. And for other species of large bodied birds. And we hope at some point, it'll even be able to detect smaller bodied birds. So for us, it's a very exciting technology. So at this point, you know, there's a lot of things that project developers can do to protect birds.
[Bald Eagle calls]
Learn more about how to make energy projects safer for birds on the Bring Birds Back Podcast. Listen in your podcast app or at BirdNote dot org. I’m Tenijah Hamilton.
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Senior Producer: John Kessler
Producer: Mark Bramhill
Managing Editor: Jazzi Johnson
Managing Producer: Conor Gearin
Content Director: Jonese Franklin
Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Bald Eagle ML200943 recorded by Gerrit Vyn.
BirdNote’s theme was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
© 2023 BirdNote May 2023
Narrator: Tenijah Hamilton
PodBBB-24-2023-05-24 PodBBB-24
