Fun fact: windmills have a speaker on then that emits a high pitched chirp. Humans cant hear it, and birds avoid it.
They also stop or reduce turbine speed during peak migration season, and scientists have found that painting one of the blades a dark color prompts the birds to fly further away from the turbine.
They do kill a lot of birds though, and bats. An absolute fuckton of bats. My partner did turbine strike studies in college, and said that the number of bat deaths is really disheartening. Bats in my area like to find the tallest “snag” to roost in… Guess what a wind turbine looks like to them…
I was lying about the speakers
Forget the “also” then.
“Other collision’s” kinda takes blame away from what’s happening, its glass windows. This from wiki: “a 2024 study on the survival rate of bird-building collision victims indicates that previous research was vastly underestimating the number of deaths caused by collisions, and in actuality well over 1 billion birds die from collisions in the United States every year.”
Fun fact, there’s a layer they can put in glass that makes it visible to birds but not us, but its more expensive, so it isn’t used most places!
Do you have a link to more info about the layer product? My google fu is failing me.
Not affiliated but this website is a perfect example: https://www.birdshades.com/
There’s a couple of other websites selling similar things, you can also buy UV film yourself to apply to your own windows. I first learned about it on Grand Designs!
Link to the grand designs build where they call it ornilux glass.
Awesome. Thanks for replying!
human-caused bird deaths
cats
:-/
Humans buy cats as pets and let them roam outside where they wreck havoc on the local wildlife.
Humans buy homes and flatten entire ecosystems with concrete. Your in-ground swimming pool and gasolines of de-weeding sprays across the Bermuda Grass lawn do more to kill native species than any house pet.
Humans allow cats to breed out of control because they’re stupid. It’s human-caused.
Those bird deaths by cats are exaggerated. The math doesn’t add up. Most cats live near human habitats and the birds that hang around human urban and suburban areas are not anywhere close to being endangered. Also, feral cats are nocturnal while most birds are daytime animals.
They are not exaggerated. In my area I used to have a flock of tiny sparrows that would fill up entire hedges before the locals befriended like 7 cats. Now I never see sparrows here anymore.
And who the hell cares they’re not endangered?
that’s weird. i live in an area with several outdoor cats, including my own, and have seen more birds here than i did 6 years ago and all the local ecologists document way more bird traffic than there was years ago due to our warming climate… weird.
Humans allow cats to breed out of control because they’re stupid.
Humans don’t “allow cats to breed”. Cats breed whether you want them to or not, often well outside the purvey of people.
What humans have done is to obliterate the rest of the ecosystem. No predatory birds or snakes. No legions of field critters. No native plant life.
Bobcats and pumas were natives of the Texas heartland for hundreds of thousands of years before humans arrived and they got on just fine. Much better at killing wildlife than any Maine Coon, too. You didn’t need the SPCA snipping their nutsacks to keep them in check. No more than you needed a breeding program for ground squirrels or passenger pigeons to keep their population size up.
Domestic cats’ population is orders of magnitude larger than the native cats population was or is.
While you’re correct that humans are also devastating the habitats of native birds, and that that is likely a (much?) larger effect, the invasive species that is the domestic housecat is also talking a toll of a couple billion birds per year.
There are multiple well-regarded studies providing those numbers. You choosing to disbelieve them is about as valid as believing vaccinations are more harmful than diseases, that climate change is a hoax, or that illegal immigrants are responsible for the housing shortage.
Domestic cats’ population is orders of magnitude larger than the native cats population was or is.
We’ve demolished the ecosystem of the native cat, so its no surprise they’re at the brink of extinction in the modern day. I haven’t seen any numbers on wild cats prior to the arrival of European settlers. But given the lack of demographic analysis, I’m betting these figures have enormous error bars, even assuming you’re conjecture is correct.
Might not help that predatory birds and wolves have also been virtually wiped out. So domestic cats have no natural predators. But - again - that’s not due to the cat population. It’s due to the human population. Cats aren’t the ones hunting wolves with sniper rifles out of helicopters.
the invasive species that is the domestic housecat is also talking a toll of a couple billion birds per year.
Habitat destruction has consistently been the primary cause of population decline, dating back to the extinction of the passenger pigeon. Housecats aren’t killing birds at a meaningfully faster rate than prior era natural predators. Bird breeding is whats on the decline, with an enormous part of that decline coming from the decline in the insect and plant population that birds subsist on.
The fixation on cats is one more example of the personalization of an industrial extinction event. You’re deflected from blaming pesticide manufacturers and real estate developers, so that you can scream your head off at your neighbor’s SPCA rescue. Killing all the housecats will not bring back the bird population because housecats aren’t the ones destroying the habitats birds need to hunt and breed.
You choosing to disbelieve them is about as valid as believing vaccinations are more harmful than diseases, that climate change is a hoax, or that illegal immigrants are responsible for the housing shortage.
Blaming cats for the declining bird population is exactly like blaming immigrants for the housing shortage. These are practically one-to-one comparisons.
You’re deflected from blaming pesticide >manufacturers and real estate developers, so that >you can scream your head off at your neighbor’s >SPCA rescue.
I literally said that habitat destruction was a larger effect, you just chose not to quote that part of what I said.
I haven’t seen any numbers on wild cats prior to the >arrival of European settlers. But given the lack of >demographic analysis, I’m betting these figures >have enormous error bars, even assuming you’re >conjecture is correct.
For bobcats, wiki cites a journal from 1996 that said population density of bobcats varied from 1-38 per 25 sq km (numbers from surveys in the 80s, when I read the journal). Making an assumption that pre-European settler numbers averaged out across North American habitats to be more like the 38, and given that the lower 48 is ~8 million sq km, that would make the pre-1500s bobcat population ~12 million. The estimates for the current free roaming domestic housecat is about 100 million. You mentioned a couple other types of cats, but mountain lions are bigger and not the ones preying on small birds. Ocelots are more akin to the domestic cat, but their native range within the United States is much smaller (AZ to LA), with large portions of that area probably not able to support nearly as many animals. But even if I generously said there were another 12 million ocelots in the US, you’d still be only at a quarter of the current domestic cat population.
domestic cats have no natural predators. But again >- that’s not due to the cat population. It’s due to the >human population.
No. It’s due to the fact that they are not native to the United States. They don’t have natural predators because they aren’t naturally here.
Your visceral defense of housecats is just another example of the hypocrisy of humans. Everyone is willing to sacrifice the desires of someone else. No one is ever willing to give up their own destructive vices though. I didn’t even say people shouldn’t own them! I just said they should keep them indoors. Obviously, that’s not what cats want. Cats want to go outside and explore…and kill small animals. Because they are naturally predators and it’s their nature. But if you want to take responsibility for your personal impact, you would keep it indoors.
And again, while I agree that the industrial amounts of habitat destruction is a bigger effect, it doesn’t change the fact that the main impact you as an individual can have/ affect, is reining in your cute murder bot.
I am pretty sure all of those pale in comparison to environmental pollution and destruction of nature reserves.
Missing these deaths as well. That’s 9.5 Billion chickens in a year.
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Domestic cats are not native to the US. Their presence is absolutely human caused. And lack of efforts to contain them is also the fault of humans. People should not feed the strays in their neighborhoods. People should not let their own cats outside. Etc.
It’s also Cats vs Collisions.
Hit a car? Hit a building? Hit a windmill.
The fifth floor of our office building regularly has greasy pigeon marks from some poor skyrat thinking the windows that are A. moderately reflective B. dirty AF and C. have never been open are all of a sudden clear paths to the inside.
My somehow-now-conservative mom lives in the midwest and will rant long and hard about how windmills make the soil under them “dirty” because they “leak oil from the blades” and “all the farmers know it’s true”
I once considered this lady smart, smh
I’m a soil scientist. Want some talking points lol.
One of her friends probably listened to a talk show where two people bitched about it for 3 minutes and played some devil’s advocate. I swear they use the conservative talk shows to train to become horrible people.
I misread as “Cars (domestic and feral)” and was very concerned about the idea of feral cars XD
feral cars
Self driving Teslas?
Waymos probably do kill a ton of urban wildlife.
That’s fake, this is real and legal.
The car from h*rry pott*r
or Christine
I think it’s worth it. It’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some bird deaths every single year so that we can have cats. That’s a prudent deal. It is rational.
Facts are facts, I guess.
In 40 years of me having cats, my cats didn’t kill anyone while living full happy spoiled lives.
I just think its crazy to roll into an empty field, drain it, sterilize it, drop down thousands of miles of concrete, clear cut the surrounding area, erect hundreds upon hundreds of giant heavily insulated homes, throw up power lines, build fences, spray pesticides, run high speed traffic 24/7/365, hand kids bb-guns and slingshots and bottle rockets…
and then explain the extinction-level drop in bird life by pointing to house cats.
How many native species did you have to kill to make the tabby the apex predator of your region?
It is indeed crazy how an invasive specie of hunters can wipe out entire species of pray. That’s kind of how invasive species work, that’s why it’s bad to have an invasive specie. Did you think scientists were just guessing why the birds suddenly disappear? There are ways to measure it, you know.
That’s kind of how invasive species work
Cats are native to every continent and virtually every biome.
Walmarts are not.
Cats are native to very, very narrow slice of Northern Africa, and only spread around with human. I don’t even think it’s possible to be native to any biome, like, on principal.
Edit for clarity: we’re talking about species here, not genus or family.Cats are native to very, very narrow slice of Northern Africa
I don’t even think it’s possible to be native to any biome
Well, if you don’t think it’s possible, I guess that settles it
Do you know what “big cat” means, and why the word big is there? That was a rhetorical question
Well, if you don’t think it’s possible
That was a polite way to tell you that you talk obvious bollocks, but I guess this subtlety is also lost on you
there are also 100s of small wild cats native to various parts of the world.
they are however, very rare to see so people are clueless that they exist. Bobcats are native to my area, but most people are extremely luck if they EVER see one their entire lifetime in the wild. I spend hours outdoors every week and I’ve seen maybe 1-2 in my entire lifetime.
They are incredibly reclusive animals. but people only ever think about animals they do see.
So we shouldn’t use cat-butter engines to generate electricity?
Even the low estimate for birds killed by collisions with cars seems high to me. I’ve been driving for over 25 years and think in that time I’ve only hit birds maybe twice, certainly fewer than 5 times. Birds just don’t seem to fly at car height very often or for very long, and they typically get out of the way quickly when on the ground (George Costanza notwithstanding).
I’m assuming my experience is pretty typical, and the majority of my driving has been in environments where birds were pretty typically abundant. If we say I’ve hit 5 birds in 25 years (again, a number that seems high), maybe we can extrapolate that 20% of drivers would hit a bird in a year. With 242 million drivers in the US, that would be 48.4 million birds killed, and again, that’s using a number that seems high in my experience.
I would be curious to see the source on those estimates and how they reached their numbers.
Per driver is an incorrect assumption. It’s would need to be per mile driven.
It would then need to be broken down by vehicle type by size and mass. For example I would not be surprised if semis aren’t the majority of vehicle bird deaths.
Wait, is hunting no longer considered a “human-caused death”? Or were windmills really a bigger killer?
But yea, outdoor domestic cats are fucking menace to birds and plenty of other small animals.
I hope it’s not included in 'Other collisions '.
“This bird died from colliding with a bullet”
Ask any groundskeeper for a glass building. You find dead birds every day.
Now compare migratory birds vs nesting. The error bar on these numbers is massive.
Are windows other collisions? I think we had 3-6 birds die hitting windows just this last year. Put up some window stickers hoping for a better result, but I have to think windows kill more than all others combined.
Trump’s giant skyscrapers covered in windows probably kill way more birds than windmills.
Should we break all Trump’s windows to save the birds. Inquiring minds want to know!
Use the buildings to kill all the pigeons and supply Trump Chicken outlets.
