Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
This demonstrates the myopic hypocrisy of the whole "green" ideology - it is fixated on CO2/Carbon footprint and fails utterly in the overarching impacts of green/renewable energies.
Great - we reduced CO2 but killed millions of birds, destroyed habitat, disrupted ecosystems.
So mountain top removal of coal didn't destroy habitat? Disrupt ecosystems? Or oil and gas extraction that causes surface contaminants or pipeline spills? Oil tanker disasters? Fukushima nuclear disaster? Chernobyl?
Do you fail to understand that the production of energy in any current form comes at a similar or greater cost, or are you just mad at 'green energy'?
As I showed, it's quite probable that feral cats alone probably meet or even exceed the estimated portion of birds killed, without even taking domestic cats into consideration.
That was using 7 billion as the estimated total number of birds in the USA. It doesn't really matter if you triple or quadruple that number, because those 80 million feral cats almost certainly kill more than 1 bird every 12 days, which is a rough approximation of the number (30/year) that I used. Add in some of the 53 million domestic cats and its clear that no matter the exact numbers, cats take a very heavy toll on wild birds.
Please provide credible sources to verify your statrements.....You're trying to tell us there are twice as many feral cats as domestic? Utter nonesense....and I assure you birds make up only a small part, if not miniscule, of the diet of feral cats. Rodents & bugs are their preferrred prey It has to do with hunting time/efort efficiecy......How much time do you think a bird spends on the ground in the forest or meadow where it's vulnerable to terrestrial predators?
My four barn cats (barn cats live somewhere towards the feral side of the feral<---> domestic continuum) proudly present me with a mouse carcass on an almost daily basis, yet, despite spending hours patiently stalking my busy bird feeders (200+ visits /hr during the spring & fall) they catch only 3 or 4 birds in a YEAR...and those vicitims are more than likely the ones ready for the bone yard anyways...It's called "thinning the herd." ...Wolves don't kill healthy elk....That's how MotherNature does things.
I don't know where that estimate comes from, the source is hard to track down. Estimates I've seen range from 30 million
here https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380 to 100 million or more
I'm sure you disagree with the Nature article above, so let us know when you get your "bird feeder rebuttal" published.
The Erickson study reported that 62.5 percent of the birds in their data set were small birds. Taking 62.5 percent of the 681,000 annual mortality estimate calculated above and adjusting this with the 1.6- and 2.7-fold multipliers from the dog search study (and adding the other 37.5 percent of birds back in), this would translate into a total of 936,000 and 1.4 million birds based on the numbers from the two sites. Averaging the two, this would suggest that 1.17 million birds are killed by wind turbines in the United States each year.
In addition to the bird fatalities discussed above, wind power projects also cause important indirect effects that must be considered.
For example, many wind facilities are located far from the existing power grid and require the construction of new powerlines, which are yet another source of bird mortality.
Not cited but in the article are the impacts due to bird strikes with power lines and the habitat loss due to wind turbines.
It's disingenuous to throw out comparative numbers for "other" bird mortalities. The issue here is adding EVEN more bird strikes due to the Green obsession with wind and the myopic focus on carbon footprints by trivializing/dismissing the overall negative impacts.
More bird fatalities is not good! So, how is Wind is Good cult addressing this issue? It isn't - it is hand waving it away by tossing out other numbers.
I don't know where that estimate comes from, the source is hard to track down. Estimates I've seen range from 30 million
here https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380 to 100 million or more
I'm sure you disagree with the Nature article above, so let us know when you get your "bird feeder rebuttal" published.
Just wanted to add that there are many localized population estimates of feral cats in wildlife journals.
We conducted a data-driven systematic review of studies that estimate predation rates of owned and un-owned cats, and estimated the magnitude of bird and mammal mortality caused by all cats across the contiguous United States (all states excluding Alaska and Hawaii). We estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3–4.0 billion birds and 6.3–22.3 billion mammals annually, and that un-owned cats cause the majority of this mortality.This magnitude of mortality is far greater than previous estimates of cat predation on wildlife and may exceed all other sources of anthropogenic mortality of US birds and mammals.
The magnitude of bird mortality caused by cat predation
After excluding studies that did not meet a priori inclusion criteria designed to increase the accuracy of our analysis, we developed probability distributions of predation rates on birds and mammals. We combined predation rate distributions with literature-derived probability distributions for US cat population sizes, and we also accounted for the proportion of owned cats allowed outdoors, the proportion of owned and un-owned cats that hunt, and imperfect detection of owned cats’ prey items.
We generated an estimated range of bird and mammal mortality caused by cat predation by incorporating the above distributions—including separate predation rate distributions for owned and un-owned cats—and running 10,000 calculation iterations. We augmented US predation data by incorporating predation rate estimates from other temperate regions (Supplementary Table S1). For birds, we generated three US mortality estimates based on predation data from studies in: (1) the United States, (2) the United States and Europe and (3) the United States, Europe, and other temperate regions (primarily Australia and New Zealand). Owing to a lack of US studies of un-owned cat predation on mammals, we estimated mammal mortality using data groupings 2 and 3. We based all other probability distributions on US studies (distribution details in Table 1; data in Supplementary Table S2).
The three estimates of bird mortality varied moderately, with a 19% difference among median estimates (Table 2). We focus interpretation on the estimate generated using US and European predation data because it is the lowest value. Furthermore, this estimate is more likely to be representative of the US than the estimate based on incorporation of data from Australia and New Zealand, where the wildlife fauna and climate are less similar to the United States. We estimate that cats in the contiguous United States annually kill between 1.3 and 4.0 billion birds (median=2.4 billion) (Fig. 1a), with ∼69% of this mortality caused by un-owned cats. The predation estimate for un-owned cats was higher primarily due to predation rates by this group averaging three times greater than rates for owned cats.
Are you doing anything about the cats that kill many many more birds?
Better yet, can a single "Oh my God, I'm terribly concerned that wind turbines kill birds!" hand-wringer link to some previous post of their expressing concern about all far greater causes of avian mortality?
Like windows (especially in large/tall buildings), cats both feral and domestic, guy wires, pesticides, vehicles, pollution, and so forth?
No?
I didn't think so. That says it all.
Their feigned concern for birds go precisely as far as it's a convenient excuse for them to complain about a technology whose mere existence that triggers them.
It only speaks to the fact that they can't come up with coherent reasons to support their position.
Not cited but in the article are the impacts due to bird strikes with power lines and the habitat loss due to wind turbines.
It's disingenuous to throw out comparative numbers for "other" bird mortalities. The issue here is adding EVEN more bird strikes due to the Green obsession with wind and the myopic focus on carbon footprints by trivializing/dismissing the overall negative impacts.
More bird fatalities is not good! So, how is Wind is Good cult addressing this issue? It isn't - it is hand waving it away by tossing out other numbers.
It's not trivializing wind turbine deaths, rather it is putting their impact in perspective. Considering the much greater numbers of birds killed by other causes the outcry singling out windmill bird deaths is curious. Why are so many people talking about it and, because of that discussion, anti-windmills? The most obvious answer is that the outrage is a manufactured part of an agenda by interests who are threatened by wind energy. Just speculating here but I would imagine proponents of green energy are the types of people who are far more concerned with bird deaths than those who oppose it.
As part of the "Wind is Good" cult I believe that the impact to bird populations from changing climate poses a far greater threat than the windmills themselves. Public sentiment can be manipulated with simple tropes like windmills kill birds when the truth is not so simple. I am concerned with all unnecessary bird deaths but I understand that the anti-windmill movement is not about birds.
I am concerned with all unnecessary bird deaths but I understand that the anti-windmill movement is not about birds.
Neither is the anti-Green movement.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
