Number of Dead Birds Floating on the Water.

I thought the bird flu passed through the north of Scotland earlier in the year, it devestated colonies in Shetland and Orkney early in the year then the east coast shortly after. I have not seem many dead birds lately and plenty of living ones, so I thought it had largely passed through here now.

Has it only just got to the far south west of the UK then?

Some summer migrating birds, most notably for us the swifts where I estimate there are barely 10% of the numbers we normally get in a summer.
 
ProDave said:
I thought the bird flu passed through the north of Scotland earlier in the year, it devestated colonies in Shetland and Orkney early in the year then the east coast shortly after. I have not seem many dead birds lately and plenty of living ones, so I thought it had largely passed through here now.

Has it only just got to the far south west of the UK then?

Some summer migrating birds, most notably for us the swifts where I estimate there are barely 10% of the numbers we normally get in a summer.
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I saw four or five swifts the other evening from a window but I think that other factors are more likely to be relevant in their case for limiting their numbers, such as the paucity of nest sites and drop in insect numbers. I think there have been about average numbers of swallows around my marina this year, maybe even more in mid summer, which I found encouraging. With swifts spending most of their life on the wing, I would guess that they are at lower than average risk of bird ’flu. I saw a programme on TV the other day with a developer showing how easy it is to install nest sites in new buildings, a special nest brick being demonstrated, so I like to think that this will catch on.
 
Greemble said:
Trump has often criticised wind power in his political speeches. Trump has said windmills cause cancer, kill birds and prevent people from watching television when the wind is not blowing.
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Crazy stuff, I've worked in the wind energy sector for 11 years now and we've done a lot to try and bring facts to some of the popular myths held about the industry. We commissioned a study in conjunction with several universities and we were able to estimate that around sixty thousand birds are killed per year in the UK by colliding with wind turbines. A sobering comparison is that the estimated number of birds killed in the UK by domestic cats is estimated at sixty MILLION per year. Neither stat is great, but when it comes to using bird deaths as a primary factor of not installing additional wind capacity, the source has frequently been found to be coming from the fossil industry.
 
Hjem said:
Crazy stuff, I've worked in the wind energy sector for 11 years now and we've done a lot to try and bring facts to some of the popular myths held about the industry. We commissioned a study in conjunction with several universities and we were able to estimate that around sixty thousand birds are killed per year in the UK by colliding with wind turbines. A sobering comparison is that the estimated number of birds killed in the UK by domestic cats is estimated at sixty MILLION per year. Neither stat is great, but when it comes to using bird deaths as a primary factor of not installing additional wind capacity, the source has frequently been found to be coming from the fossil industry.
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Without wishing to exonerate feline bird-destroyers, the question about wind turbines might be whether they adversely affect particular species flying certain migration routes and whether this might affect their numbers. I mention this because I don't know the answer but suspect that in some, maybe only a few, cases the overall numbers might be misleading.
 
Obviously birds fly a set route. When in Holland late one year I saw numerous flocks of birds counting in their thousands, flying along the canal routes. As the canal I was on changed course, so did the flocks of birds. It was wierd that they were obviously navigating by the land features. They were not flying particularly high. Certainly within the height of windmill blades for some of them.These land features had not been there for all time, but presumably they had adapted, as different generations learned the route.
If in the interim someone were to stick a wind farm on the route, I could imagine hundreds being destroyed, until they worked out what was happening.
 
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