With no context, the letter to the editor
It alarmed me, so I went to the fws.gov “Threats to Birds” web page for more information. I discovered that wind turbines (which kill up to 328,000 birds a year, not 500,000) are the lowest mortality-causing threat on their list. Collisions with communication towers cause an estimated average 6.6 million bird deaths; with electric utility lines, 25.5 million bird deaths; with vehicles, 214.5 million bird deaths, and with building glass, 599 million deaths.
Should we ditch the cell phones, stop driving, dismantle the electric grid and put no glass in our windows? Each of these things causes far more bird deaths than wind turbines. And keep your cat inside: predation by cats dwarfs all of these threats, with 2.4 billion bird deaths in an average year – more than 7,300 times greater than the toll of windmills.
Don’t be misled by numbers taken out of context. Wind power is an important component in the crucial task of using renewable energy to combat climate change – which is a threat to migratory birds as well as to humans.
Ilana SternDurango
