Eagle Kill

            A 2013 wildlife study estimated that wind turbines killed about 888,000 bats and 573,000 birds in 2012 alone. Since then, wind capacity has grown 24%, not including wind farms being built in Perquimans County, NC, where I live. Should we be concerned?

            One victim in particular that should concern us is our national symbol, the bald eagle. According to Robert Bryce, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a proposed rule change by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would extend the length of permits for accidental eagle kills from the current five years to 30 years. This would allow wind energy producers to kill or injure as many as 4,200 bald eagles every year. That’s a lot, considering there are only about 72,000 bald eagles in the continental U.S. Even worse, we won’t know the real number of kills, because the wind industry doesn’t have to report he data.

            When it comes to penalties, the Fish and Wildlife Service is looking the other way; nothing must impede progress in the development of renewable energy sources. Not so when it comes to that nasty black stuff that gets pumped out of the ground. According to Bryce, this same Fish and Wildlife Service not long ago convinced the Justice Department to file criminal indictments against three oil companies working in North Dakota’s Bakken field for inadvertently killing six ducks and one phoebe. If that’s not a double standard, I don’t know what is.

            Which brings up this question: once wind farms go into operation in our county, who will count and report on the dead bats and birds swatted out of the sky by the whirring turbines?