A lot of people, when looking at a magnificent, big raptor like an eagle, focus on that meat-shearing hooked beak, those big talons and forget that the animal is rather fragile. A large bird that can fly powerfully, like an eagle, can do so because their bones are hollow. Birds are also able to maintain sustained flight because their respiratory system is more efficient than those of mammals, but that's a topic for another day.
It doesn't take much to break a bird's wing. The year we moved to Alaska, on one fine, sunny early May Saturday afternoon, I was seated out on our deck with an adult beverage when I heard a motorcycle stop on the road out front. I walked down, curious to see what was going on, to find the motorcycle guy had spotted a bald eagle with a broken wing near the road. As near as we could figure, the bird had tried to drop on a prey item, probably a spruce grouse or a snowshoe hare - we have lots of both around - and had clipped the power line with a wing.
A neighbor happened along, we rounded up a dog travel kennel and a big dipnet, captured the injured bird, and the neighbor took it off to a wildlife rehab center, who told us the bird would almost certainly never fly again.
Power lines, though, are not a major source of eagle fatalities. The big "green energy" windmills are, though - or, at least, we think they are. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, whose job it is to keep this data, won't release the numbers.
Every wind-killed eagle found at an industrial wind site is quickly reported to the federal Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). Every year each site also submits an annual kill report to FWS. None of this data is publicly available.
The FWS eagle kill data is all a big government secret designed to protect the wind industry from public outrage. This has to stop.
The public has a right to know about all these eagle kills. In addition, this data would support research on ways to reduce the killing. For example, it has been suggested that painting the blades black would help the eagles avoid the blades. In fact, there are a lot of technologies that could be studied given comprehensive kill data.
We should note that it's not just bald eagles, our national symbol, that is affected. The equally magnificent golden eagle is also prone to injury by these ugly monsters, although golden eagles are more likely to inhabit mountainous areas where there are fewer windmills. Big soaring hawks, especially of the genus Buteo, like red-tailed hawks, are also at risk.
And FWS refuses to give us the numbers.
It is no secret where all this kill data is. It is all in one big FWS database called the Injury and Mortality Reporting System (IMR), but all you can do is enter your kill data. You cannot look at anyone else’s data such as all the kills in a given wind facility or group of facilities.
Important wind facility groups might include those using a given technology, or in a specific county or congressional district. There are lots of analyses that might be important, but only FWS can see all this data. It is a government secret.
Another approach should be to ask for specific kill data, but that does not work either. For example, the Wyoming based Albany County Conservancy (ACC) sent FWS a Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request for some very specific kill data from four wind projects.
When the response finally came, FWS said ACC could only see 256 pages or 22% of the 1156 pages that corresponded to their query. The other 910 pages were secret. The available 22% did not begin to answer their questions. The wind-kill data is simply secret.
Why? Why is this a secret? Why would FWS hide this from the public? Why are the numbers of our national symbol being killed in the name of climate change being hidden?
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The only possible reason I can think of is that the numbers of eagles and other birds killed by these contraptions is shockingly high, higher than any of us may have suspected. We should note as well that, were you to come across one of these dead eagles and pluck a feather from the carcass, you would be subject to criminal charges and a hefty fine - but the builders of these windmills are in no way held responsible for these eagle and other raptor deaths.
And where is the Audobon Society in all this?
I've always been interested in birds. We go to some lengths to attract our local birds to the area of our Alaska home. We keep bird nesting boxes for the swallows that spend every summer here hoovering up mosquitoes; we keep (bear-proof) feeders to attract chickadees, juncos, nuthatches, redpolls, and woodpeckers. Every spring, we hear the thrushes and warblers calling in the brush and from high in the trees, and it's not at all unusual to see an eagle soaring overhead.
The big raptors are some of the most magnificent creatures on the planet. These windmills, put up in the nebulous cause of "climate change," are killing them, and our own government won't even release the data on how many are dying.
In this matter, I would call on the Trump administration to immediately order the release of this information. This is our national symbol, after all, along with any number of other magnificent creatures. We have a right to know. The means here come nowhere close to justifying these ends.
