Eagles are magnificent creatures. Around here, we have Bald Eagles, which are not only magnificent predators but also our national symbol. In Wyoming, they have the Golden Eagle, a circumpolar species found in mountainous and open areas from Scotland to Siberia as well as here in the New World. They are big, they are beautiful, they are impressive hunters, and the climate scolds and "green" energy advocates are killing them with wind turbines.
It's not just eagles, either. A lot of the big soaring hawks of genus Buteo fall victim to these spinning death mills as well, birds like the Red-Tailed Hawk and the Rough-Legged Hawk. These soaring birds are particularly vulnerable because of the nature of their flight, with wings fully extended, and when a spinning turbine blade hits the surprisingly fragile wing of a raptor, that wing is shattered, and the bird plummets to its death.
Wyoming in particular has been ground zero for eagle deaths by windmill. Now, with a new big, expensive wind power boondoggle in the works, Wyoming should now be demanding to have at least a reasonable estimate of eagle deaths before allowing the project to proceed.
The Wyoming wind power permitting authority has a formal hearing beginning on August 31, 2026, to consider the application from a major wind project. An approval decision on this project would be premature, because a crucial piece of environmental data, the projected eagle kills from the project, is still in progress.
Wyoming needs to decide how many eagles it is willing to kill.
The permitting authority is the Wyoming Industrial Siting Council. At issue is the proposed 650-megawatt Laramie Range Wind Project with hundreds of eagle-killing turbines. This is a very large project.
The Siting Council is supposed to carefully consider the environmental impacts of the project, but there is a glaring gap in their information. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) is supposed to predict the number of eagles killed by this project but has yet to do so. The Siting Council should wait for this crucial data.
We've reported on the Fish & Wildlife Service's (FWS) reluctance to hand over this data before.
Read More: Federal Fish and Wildlife Service Is Hiding Windmill-Related Eagle Deaths
Green Blades of Death: Wind Farms' Massive Eagle Kills About to Be Unveiled
We do know that the FWS has a model they use to predict deaths by windmill.
FWS normally estimates the golden eagle death rate for a wind project when that project applies for a permit to kill eagles under the Eagle Protection Act. In this case, Wyoming should ask FWS to do the calculations directly for them, not via the wind project developer. To the extent the developer’s eagle-related data is being used, it needs to be verified.
The FWS uses what is called a Collision Risk Model to predict golden eagle deaths from a proposed wind turbine array. The model output is a probability distribution, not a single death number. There is a probability for a given number of deaths.
For eagle-kill permitting purposes, the FWS uses the number of deaths with an 80% probability of occurring. The Siting Council might also want to consider numbers like the 50% and 30% death rates, which will be increasingly larger than the 80% rate. These lower-probability death rates are still serious likelihoods, calling for appropriate caution.
If the FWS will not provide these golden eagle death calculations, then Wyoming should develop them itself. The Siting Council must have the relevant eagle death data before it can make an informed decision on the huge Laramie Range Wind Project.
Or better yet, just forgo the whole thing. If there's any place that wind power might work, mind you, it's Wyoming; but the question becomes, how many eagle deaths are we going to accept for a technology that is inefficient, costly, and unreliable? Especially when the government agency tasked with examining these things is strangely reluctant to share that data?
It seems pretty obvious that the FWS is reluctant to release these numbers because they are far higher than expected. Even The Weather Channel, which is a green-energy-friendly organization, is concerned about the number of these kills, which they cite as possibly being as high as half a million per year. That's unconscionable.
Wyoming, honestly, should stomp on the brakes on this project. The problems with wind power installations are many and varied, from the massive concrete foundations to the expensive and scarce materials used in their construction, not to mention the growing problems of what to do with all those huge blades when they wear out. And it's not as though Wyoming downs have other sources of energy; coal, if nothing else, as Wyoming is actually the No. 1 coal-producing state.
We can get along very well without these massive wind-power boondoggles. They mess up the landscape, they are ugly, they are expensive, and they are not ever going to replace traditional sources of energy, at least, not with current technology. And even if we can live with them, it's apparent that hawks and eagles cannot.
Enough is enough. Wyoming should shut this project down.
