![]() ![]() ![]() Wind energy installations can also destroy stopover habitat, and their presence nearby can alter birds’ behavior. But when they land to rest and refuel or take off to resume their migration, they pass through altitudes where they could collide with a turbine or its rotating blades, known as the rotor-swept zone. Migrating birds tend to fly at night, and mostly stay far above wind turbines. Millions of migratory birds pass through the region every year. The Great Lakes region of the United States is “is a globally important bird area with significant current wind development that is projected to continue,” says study team member Emily Cohen, an ecologist at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. “The fine granularity and broad extent of weather surveillance radar observations made this discovery possible,” Buler says.īuler and his collaborators analyzed data from seven weather radar stations collected over four years during the spring (early April through mid-June) and autumn (mid-August through end of October) migration seasons – 4,256 nights’ worth of radar data overall. Fish and Wildlife Service suggests an exclusion zone of 3 miles, while the Nature Conservancy recommends 5 miles. “This is much farther than has been considered before when making recommendations about siting wind turbines to avoid such bird concentrations,” says study team member Jeff Buler, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Delaware in Newark. Wind turbines should be built at least 12 miles away from Great Lakes shorelines in order to protect the stopover habitats of migrating birds, according to a new analysis of flocks picked up on weather radar systems. ![]()
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