Wandering Tattler - November 2011.pdf - Nature Vancouver

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MASSIVE BIRD KILLAT WEST VIRGINIA WIND FARMindustry assertions that just two birds per year are killed onaverage by each turbine. Data from Altamont Pass, Californiawind farms – the most studied in the nation – suggest thatover 2,000 Golden Eagles alone have been killed there.On May 23, 2003 at the Mountaineer wind farm in theAllegheny Mountains, at least 33 birds were killed. Some ofthe deaths were attributed to collisions with wind turbines andsome to collisions with a substation.October 28 2011 - With the deaths of nearly 500 birds at theLaurel Mountain wind facility earlier this month, three of thefour wind farms operating in West Virginia have nowexperienced large bird fatality events, according to AmericanBird Conservancy (ABC), the nation’s leading bird conservationorganization“Wind energy has the potential to be a green energy source,but the industry still needs to embrace simple, bird-smartprinciples that would dramatically reduce incidents across thecountry, such as those that have occurred in West Virginia,”said Kelly Fuller, ABC’s Wind Campaign Coordinator.There were three critical circumstances that tragically alignedin each of the three West Virginia events to kill these birds.Each occurred during bird migration season, during lowvisibility weather conditions, and with the addition of a deadlytriggering element – an artificial light source. Steady-burninglights have been shown to attract and disorient birds,particularly night-migrating songbirds that navigate bystarlight, and especially during nights where visibility is lowsuch as in fog or inclement weather. Circling birds collide withstructures or each other, or drop to the ground fromexhaustion.At the Laurel Mountain facility in the Allegheny Mountains,almost 500 birds were reportedly killed after lights were lefton at an electrical substation associated with the wind project.The deaths are said to have occurred not from collisions withthe wind turbines themselves, but from a combination ofcollisions with the substation and apparent exhaustion as birdscaught in the light’s glare circled in mass confusion.“The good news is that it shouldn’t be hard to make changesthat will keep these sorts of unnecessary deaths fromhappening again, but it’s disturbing that they happened at all.It has long been known that many birds navigate by the starsat night that they normally fly lower during bad weatherconditions, and that artificial light can draw them off courseand lead to fatal collision events. That’s why minimizingoutdoor lighting at wind facilities is a well-known operatingstandard. And yet lights were left on at these sites resultingin these unfortunate deaths. This reinforces the need to havemandatory federal operational standards as opposed to theoptional, voluntary guidelines that are currently underdiscussion,” Fuller said.A fourth wind farm in West Virginia, the Beech Ridge WindEnergy Project in Greenbrier County, has not experiencedlarge mortality events, likely because it is currently prohibitedby a court order from operating during night-time betweenApril 1 and November 15.“Some West Virginia conservation groups have suggested thatother wind farms in the state should shut down their windturbines at certain times and seasons to protect birds. Giventhe recurring bird-kill problems, that idea needs to beseriously considered, at least during migration season on nightswhere low visibility is predicted. A wind farm in Texas is doingjust that, so it is possible.” said Fuller.This article was written by American Bird Conservancy (ABC),a 501(c) (3) not-for-profit membership organization whosemission is to conserve native birds and their habitatsthroughout the Americas. ABC acts by safeguarding the rarestspecies, conserving and restoring habitats, and reducingthreats, while building capacity in the bird conservationmovement.Editor’s Note: Having read this article how do you nowfeel about the many wind form proposal in various partsof British Columbia, such as Pink Mountain in NortheasternBC, and some of the other sites along migrationroutes for many of our bird species?On the evening of September 24 this year at the Mount Stormfacility in the Allegheny Mountains, 59 birds and two batswere killed. Thirty of the dead birds were found near a singlewind turbine that was reported to have had internal lightingleft on overnight. This incident stands in stark contrast toThe Wandering Tattler – November 2011 page 8
BIRDS' EYE VIEW ISFAR MORE COLOURFUL THAN OUR OWNsaid. "The startling thing to realize is that although thecolours of birds look so incredibly diverse and beautiful to us,we are colour blind compared to birds."The brilliant colours of birds have inspired poets and naturelovers, but researchers at Yale University and the Universityof Cambridge say these existing hues represent only a fractionof what birds are capable of seeing.The findings based on study of the avian visual system,reported in the June 23 issue of the journal BehaviouralEcology, show that over millions of years of evolution plumagecolours went from dull to bright as birds gradually acquiredthe ability to create newer pigments and structural colours."Our clothes were pretty drab before the invention of anilinedyes, but then colour became cheap and there was an explosionin the colourful clothes we wear today," said Richard Prum,chair and the William Robertson Coe Professor in theDepartment of Ornithology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biologyand co-author of the paper. "The same type of thing seemed tohave happened with birds."Birds are well known for their stunning plumage colours, whichare created by a diverse set of pigment-based and structural(optical) mechanisms. (Credit: Courtesy of David Kjaer)BIRD SONGS CHANGEWITH THE LANDSCAPEScience Daily (June 22, 2011)Scientists have speculated for years on how birds obtainedtheir colours, but the Yale/Cambridge study was the first toask what the diversity of bird colours actually look like tobirds themselves. Ironically, the answer is that birds see manymore colours than humans can, but birds are also capable ofseeing many more colours than they have in their plumage.Birds have additional colour cones in their retina that aresensitive to ultraviolet range so they see colours that areinvisible to humans.Over time, birds have evolved a dazzling combination ofcolours that included various melanin pigments, which givehuman skin its tint, carotenoid pigments, which come fromtheir diets, and structural colours, like the blue eyes ofhumans. The study shows that the structural colours producethe lion's share of colour diversity to bird feathers, eventhough they are relatively rare among birds.Co-author Mary Caswell Stoddard of Cambridge, who beganinvestigating the avian visual system as an undergraduate atYale, would like to know why birds have not yet developed theability to produce, for example, ultraviolet yellow or redcolours in their feathers -- colours invisible to humans butvisible to the birds themselves."We don't know why plumage colours are confined to thissubset," Stoddard said. "The out of gamut colours may beimpossible to make with available mechanisms or they may bedisadvantageous.""That doesn't mean that birds' colour palette might noteventually evolve to expand into new colours," Prum said."Birds can make only about 26 to 30 percent of the coloursthey are capable of seeing but they have been working hardover millions of years to overcome these limitations," PrumWhen the going gets rough, the tough apparently sing slower.As vegetation reclaimed formerly cleared land in California,Oregon and Washington over the last 35 years, male whitecrownedsparrows have lowered their pitch and slowed downtheir singing so that their love songs would carry betterthrough heavier foliage."This is the first time that anyone has shown that bird songscan shift with rapid changes in habitat," says biologistElizabeth Derryberry who made the finding as part of herdissertation research at Duke University.She compared recordings of individual birds in 15 differentareas with some nearly forgotten recordings made at the samespots in the 1970s by a California Academy of Sciencesresearcher, and found that the musical pitch and speed of thetrill portion of the sparrows' short songs had droppedconsiderably. "I was really surprised to find that songs hadchanged in a similar way in so many different populations."She then used archival aerial photography to see how thefoliage had changed in a subset of those spots, and found thatthe one population whose song hadn't slowed down lived in anarea where the foliage hadn't changed either.The physics is clear, but the biology is a little less certain. Alower, slower song suffers less reverberation in denser foliageand will be heard more accurately. In turn, that means it ismore likely to be copied by young males who are choosing whichsong they will learn. Over generations, that should cause thesong to slow down and drop in pitch as the foliage changes.In the short term however, Derryberry doesn't know whetherthe clearer song wins better territories or mates, althoughThe Wandering Tattler – November 2011 page 9
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