Deconstructing the wind farm bird-kill story

By Jack Coleman in The Providence Journal on Thursday, October 20, 2005

PLYMOUTH -- What is it about opponents of Cape Wind Associates' wind-power proposal that makes them keep confusing Nantucket Sound -- site of the proposed project -- with Altamont Pass, in California?

At first blush, the differences are evident. Nantucket Sound is in coastal waters off Cape Cod; Altamont Pass is a rolling stretch of dry grassland east of San Francisco.

The two places share little except that Altamont Pass is home to thousands of wind turbines and Nantucket Sound would have 130 of them. Those in California are land-based; those proposed for Massachusetts would be offshore -- the first such wind farm in the United States.

Altamont Pass is of keen importance to opponents of the Cape Wind proposal because the California turbines have killed thousands of birds since they were first built, more than two decades ago. But all this shows is that some locations -- such as Altamont Pass -- are ill-suited to wind farms.

To take from this that the Cape Wind project should not be constructed is like saying tall buildings should not be built in Boston because of fault lines in California.

In addition, many of the Altamont Pass wind turbines are ancient by industry standards (how efficient was the Internet 20 years ago?), and are being replaced by taller machines with blades higher off the ground -- above the flight paths of many birds.

While Cape Wind opponents point to bird kills at Altamont Pass, they neglect a more valid comparison: that of offshore wind farms in Europe.

In June, two Danish researchers with the Environmental Research Institute announced the results of a six-year radar study of avian impacts from offshore wind turbines -- the first such research. The researchers, Mark Desholm and Johnny Kahlert, focused on a specific wind farm, the 72 turbines off Nysted, in southern Denmark.

Desholm and Kahlert began their work in 1999, while the Nysted project was still in the planning stage; the 360-foot turbines became fully operational in December of 2003. The four years between the start of the research and the wind farm's going online provided the researchers with abundant time to study migrating birds. Their conclusion? "Overall, less than 1 percent of the ducks and geese fly close enough to the turbines to be at any risk of collision."

Their report continues: "The analyses also show that birds remain at a greater distance [from] the turbines during the night, while flying inside the wind farm. Thus, these birds reduce their collision risk.

"In total, less than 1 percent of the waterbirds migrated close enough to the turbines to be at any risk of colliding."

The research did come with caveats: The data were based on the first year of wind-power generation by the turbines; maintenance trips by boat could have affected bird behavior; and the area is dominated by eider ducks and geese. "Other seabirds may respond differently to offshore wind farms," said the report, "and this ought to be studied."

But even with these caveats, the research contradicts the overwrought assertions that offshore wind turbines will ravage offshore bird populations.

The Danish research also confirms what I saw during a trip to Denmark in May, organized by Clean Power Now, a Cape Cod-based advocacy group that supports the Cape Wind proposal. At Nysted, we were taken on boat tours through the wind farm. En route to the wind farm, geese and eider ducks were easy to spot, but there were fewer sightings the closer we got, and within the farm, what birds we did see flew well clear of the turbines.

I asked our boat captain, a mariner of more than two decades' local experience, if he was aware of any birds killed by the turbines. "We have never seen it," said Gregers Glensdorf. "I have never seen a dead bird in the water in this area. I don't think it is happening. Some people believe the park has become a navigational beacon to migratory birds."

Meanwhile, listening to Cape Wind's foes, you'd think that wind turbines pose the only threat to birds. Once again, the evidence supports a different conclusion.

A U.S. Government Accountability Office report of Sept. 19 urged federal officials to take a more active role in siting wind farms to avoid bird kill. But the report also pointed out that millions of birds are killed by collisions with buildings and towers, pesticides, and attacks by feral and domestic cats. "In the context of other sources of avian mortalities," said the report, "it does not appear that wind power is responsible for a significant number of dead birds."

And, lest we forget, birds along our coastline are genuinely threatened by the heavy oil that's hauled in barges, which has an unfortunate habit of spilling into the ocean and killing terns, gulls and other birds by the hundreds.

And what of the threat to offshore fowl from another source: climate change?

"How many birds are killed from global-warming emissions and other fossil-[fuel] plant pollution, like smog, soot and mercury?" asks Frank Gorke, an alternative-energy advocate at the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group. "And what's the greatest threat to birds? Arguably, it's habitat destruction, and global warming is going to wreak havoc on avian habitat."

A startling example was reported in July 2004 by the British newspaper The Independent. "Hundreds of thousands of Scottish seabirds have failed to breed this summer in a wildlife catastrophe which is being linked by scientists directly to global warming," wrote Independent reporter Michael McCarthy.

A two-degree-Celsius increase in water temperature in the North Sea over the preceding two decades had disrupted the marine food chain. More than 172,000 breeding pairs of guillemots had been recorded in Orkney and Shetland in the Seabird 2000 census. " 'This summer, the birds have produced almost no young,' according to Peter Ellis, Shetland area manager for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds," wrote McCarthy. Some 24,000 pairs of Arctic terns and 16,700 pairs of Shetland kittiwakes, or small gulls, have "probably suffered complete failure," Ellis told McCarthy.

In this country, few if any supporters of offshore wind power assert that the Cape Wind turbines would not kill any birds, and the proposal's draft environmental-impact report estimates at least 364 bird deaths annually. Nevertheless, the cost in bird fatalities must be measured against the cost of failure to reverse climate change, which scientists believe is being exacerbated by our reliance on fossil fuels.

And among the places most vulnerable to this potentially seismic disruption are the low-lying coastal areas surrounding Nantucket Sound.

Jack Coleman is a former political reporter and bureau chief at the Cape Cod Times who writes in support of the Cape Wind proposal at winddfarmblog.com.