Ornithologists: money for nothing and birds for free

Manipulating eagles and other birds is kind of fun, exciting for sure

Picture: bald eagle fitted with radio transmitter and harness. Feathers, ruffled by transmitter & harness, will lose their insulation quality.

Quotes from an article in East County Magazine: http://eastcountymagazine.org/node/14638

“Several witnesses reported a mortality rate of 90% for birds mounted with Bittner’s transmitters during one nine-month period. Yet Bittner reported only a 20% mortality rate during that nine month period in 2011.”

Picture: immature bald eagle fitted with a radio transmitter. The white feathers ruffled by the transmitter are evident.

It’s a no brainer that something attached on a bird’s back for over a year will cause feather damage, exposing the bare skin to rain.

Even 20% collateral damage is unacceptable, so what to think of 90%? Many ornithologists get paid for playing with radio trackers, their new toys. They trap eagles, fit them with a transmitter, release them, then map the birds’ displacements. It’s fun, and they get paid for it. Their tracking reports get filed away and are useless most of the time. For instance: their maps should be used first and foremost to keep subsidized speculators from putting up wind turbines in migration corridors. But other ornithologists – sometimes the same ones – will be well-paid to write reports helping these unscrupulous businessmen overcome any objections to their placing “cuisinarts of the air” where migrating birds fly.

Radio tracking ornithologists are sometimes contracted to “prove”, after massaging the collected data, that eagles won’t fly into a wind farm planned to be built on their territory. An article in English on the Spanish website Iberica 2000 relates the death of two golden eagles fitted with radio transmitters at Bein Ghlas, a site where one of these save-the-planet-crooks wanted to plant his wind contraptions. This information is nowhere to be found in Scotland, where the omerta on this subject is as thick as a double hamburger. http://www.iberica2000.org/es/Articulo.asp?Id=3744

These soul-of-Scotland creatures died shortly after their capture and radio-fitting. The turbines were built shortly after, where they used to fly, and have been killing more eagles as some happen to investigate the now-empty breeding territory. It’s prime eagle habitat, so young wandering eagles are attracted by the vast empty nests and the rich hunting grounds. And they get chopped up by the blades. 

These bird “scientists” make money both ways: getting paid for tracking the eagles, and for writing favourable “environmental impact” reports. They help rich people get richer on the back of taxpayers (stuffing themselves with bloated subsidies paid for wind energy), and litterally on the back of the eagles as well. These are killed by the transmitters, or sliced down by the turbines. All on account of greedy ornithologists.

Some ornithologists are honest, real scientists, but we don’t hear from them. Why are they covering up these crimes? Peer pressure? This is a lousy excuse: what about retired ones? Anyway, when members of a profession cover up the crimes of  their colleagues, they are just as guilty as the criminals. This leads me to wonder if ornithologists love birds, or if they just make a living from them, like parasites that kill their hosts.

The rest of the article on Bittner is well worth reading: http://eastcountymagazine.org/node/14638

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Bird mortality: spilling the glass

 

Sea eagle killed by wind turbine in Denmark

Lying by omission

Wind farm stooges say: cars, cats, windows, etc. kill more birds than wind turbines.

Using the same logic, the asbestos industry could be reborn!

It would just have to say: my products kill fewer people than car accidents. Wouldn’t that be fun!

All they’d have to do is finance electoral campaigns left and right, and the corrupt system would do the rest.

It may be true, at this stage of the game, that wind turbines kill less birds than do cars and cats. But they kill rarer birds, and twice as many bats (which cars, cats, windows etc. don’t kill). In addition, they are on their way to killing 20 times more when the number of turbines is multiplied by 20, as are planning the wind industry and their gnomes.


There are plenty more reasons to reject the silly cars & cats argument:


A/ – They say: only 573,000 birds are killed yearly by wind turbines in the United States, and 888,000 bats – total: 1.4 million deaths. And they add: this is small in comparison to the many millions killed by other human activities. They conveniently forget that wind turbines are the only human activity that kills BATS – if you except the taking down of roofs, houses, buildings and other constructions. But apart from that, there is another, much higher and much more likely estimate: 13 to 39 million birds and bats killed annually by wind turbines in the United States – based on an extrapolation from Spanish monitoring reports. It is a valid extrapolation, for there are no reasons to believe that US birds are smarter or more cautious than Spanish ones. Figures from Germany and Sweden confirm this high level of mortality, as published by the California Energy Commission.

Is it really surprising that a wind turbine would kill on average one bat a day and one bird every other day? – especially if you consider that bats, and some birds, are attracted to wind turbines, as per the latest paper by Clive Hambler, lecturer at Oxford University: http://wcfn.org/2013/07/01/tip-of-the-iceberg/
Consider this: one bat a day and one bird every other day = 365 bats and 182 birds a year x 39,000 wind turbines = 21 million birds and bats killed in the US annually.

The low official estimate of 1.4 million can be explained by deficiencies denounced by Jim Wiegand here: http://www.windturbinesyndrome.com/2013/wind-energys-colossal-lies-about-bird-bat-mortality-wildlife-biologist/   and by these added considerations: it is a well-known fact that windfarm employees make carcasses disappear. If this weren’t enough, reporting mortality to the authorities is the responsibility of each wind farm operator. Is this a joke? – No, it isn’t, would you believe?

Such cynicism, such blatant disregard for ethics, such insults to our intelligence are reminiscent of the much scorned-upon “banana republics” of yesteryear. But since lobbying is a legal activity in America, Europe, Australia, Japan, etc., don’t expect ethics to be upheld there either. As for the media, being “politically correct” means turning a blind eye to any wrong that bears a “green” label, even if it is the yearly death of 123 million birds and bats from 225,000 wind turbines worldwide, to be soon multiplied by 20 (see above), i.e. 2.4 billion deaths a year.

B/ – Nothing justifies the mass killing of eagles, cranes, storks, and most bird and bat species, by wind turbines and their power lines. The limited success, to date, in stopping other causes of bird and bat mortality does not justify adding another killer!  It’s a no-brainer that this is a crooked argument, yet the PC media swallows it whole – hook, line and sinker!

C/ – two wrongs don’t make a right, they never did. But the gnomes deny this, and are trying to force this denial into our brains, by sheer repetition. They are busy brainwashing our children too, in schools! Teachers have become the peddlers of their lethal products. It is quite simply sickening. What happened to our democratic ideals? We are living a scenario written by George Orwell.

D/ – Wind turbines do not REPLACE cars, or any other cause of bird mortality. They don’t even replace fossil fuel power plants. See these amazing articles:
http://epaw.org/echoes.php?article=n127
http://epaw.org/echoes.php?article=n124

As they don’t replace other causes of mortality, they are just creating an ADDITIONAL one. That too is a no brainer, yet they are trying to convince the public that additional mortality is OK, precisely at a time when birds are being decimated worldwide. And it’s not Global Warming (what global warming? – global cooling is now more likely) that’s killing them – read this disturbing article:
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/07/songbird-migration/franzen-text
C´mon, public, wake up!

The accomplices of BIG WIND, in bad faith, deny (by omission or otherwise) that a single drop can spill a full glass, and that measuring the CUMULATIVE EFFECT is essential to the work of conservationists. Third grade students would fail their exams if they denied such universal truths. And I am NOT talking about just a drop: I’m talking about a dripping faucet, I’m talking about 2.4 billion deaths a year (as per above).


I am talking about massive extinctions. Here are the principal deniers (by omission or otherwise): Greenpeace, WWF, FoE, RSPB, Audubon Society, Sierra Club, Birds Australia, NABU, LPO, NRDC, Peregrine Fund, CIPAMEX, Birdlife International. Shame on them! They bear the full responsibility of the extinctions to come in which wind turbines (and their power lines) will have contributed. This is why I call them stooges, or gnomes. They don’t deserve respect, and they won’t get mine. I invite everyone to call them “green gnomes” from hereon in, or “gneems” by contraction.