News from the U.K., given the headline “Rare bird last seen in Britain 22 years ago killed by wind turbine in front of crowd of twitchers who turned up to catch a glimpse”:
There had been only eight recorded sightings of the white-throated needletail in the UK since 1846. So when one popped up again on British shores this week, twitchers were understandably excited.
A group of 40 enthusiasts dashed to the Hebrides to catch a glimpse of the brown, black and blue bird, which breeds in Asia and winters in Australasia.
But instead of being treated to a wildlife spectacle they were left with a horror show when it flew into a wind turbine and was killed.
The headline reminds me of Daren Bakst’s report “A Wind Power Primer: Emission reduction negligible for land-intensive, unreliable, noisy, ugly, bird-killing turbines.”
I’m sure the advocates for the unreliable, price-hiking, expensive “Cuisinarts in the Sky” will mount a reductio ad victum felis argument after this. Some cat would have eaten that bird, you know, but without wind power, who would make energy more expensive for poor families?
The unfortunate U.K. “twitchers” could take scant comfort from the fact that, here in the U.S., we would change our permitting standards so that the turbines could slaughter without interruption our own, endangered national symbol, the bald eagle, for 30 years instead of 5. (And the only conceivably down side to that, according to U.S. officials, would be if a member of the Lumbee Tribe picked up one of its feathers.)