Wind turbines kill ‘shocking’ number of bats each year

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By Erik Stokstad, Science. 

Excerpt: In 2003, wildlife biologists made a gruesome discovery on a mountain in West Virginia. Several thousand bats had been killed at a new wind farm. Until then, birds such as hawks and eagles were thought to be at the most risk of being struck dead by the massive spinning blades at the top of wind turbines. More than 28 bat species have since been confirmed as victims at similar facilities nationwide. But it has been challenging to estimate just how many bats are dying. Now, the most comprehensive study to date has yielded a distressingly large number. Some 18.7 million bats died from wind turbines in the United States between 1981 and 2024, it estimates—and the problem has grown dramatically worse in recent years. The research, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests about 100,000 bats died per year 2 decades ago. But by 2021, the boom in wind farms had pushed the toll to 1.5 million bats annually. ...The findings are “shocking,” says Winifred Frick, chief scientist of Bat Conservation International, and they add urgency to recent proposals for reducing the hazard to bats by changing where wind turbines are placed or how they operate.... 

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