Killing Them Softly: How Wind Turbines Affect Waterfowl Nesting

“We are losing quality wetlands in the Prairie Pothole Region at an alarming rate already... Wind energy might have a compound effect.”

Killing Them Softly: How Wind Turbines Affect Waterfowl Nesting - Wildfowl:

Green energy may be good for the environment, but a growing number of scientists are concerned it may not be for waterfowl. A recent study in the Dakotas is adding fuel to those concerns. It found breeding duck densities were considerably lower around large-scale wind farms compared to wetlands with no turbines in sight.
“We don’t know if the decline is a result of the towers themselves, the motion, noise of the blades, or the increased traffic from maintenance workers,” says USFWS biologist Dr. Chuck Loesch.
“It could be a combination of all those or something else, but that really wasn’t the focus of the study. We wanted to determine if the presence of wind energy development had an impact on duck breeding densities.”
One nesting site had a 56-percent lower breeding pair density than a similar site with no wind turbines.

Continue reading at Wildfowl Magazine (includes comments from Scott Petrie; some specific to Ontario)

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