New Study: Fracking Fractures Bird Populations. Wind Turbines Not so Much. But we Knew That.

New study confirms what people in wind turbine areas keep telling me.
They are not seeing impacts on bird populations, or wildlife, from wind turbines.
Above, farmer, former County Commission Chair, and keen wildlife observer George Green of Isabella County, MI. We sat in the shed behind his house, which is equipped with a powerful bird-spotting scope, which, as he describes, he uses to watch eagles in the area.

Los Angeles Times:

Erik Katovich, an environmental economist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Geneva, had been following all the news coverage of wind power and bird deaths, and he feared it was being “weaponized by those opposed to renewable energy.” A longtime birder himself — he grew up in Minnesota bird-watching with his dad — he wanted to know whether the harm to avian life from wind energy development in California, Iowa and other states was getting blown out of proportion.

So like any good scholar, he ran the numbers.

Katovich turned to data from the National Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count, an annual effort dating to 1900 during which tens of thousands of volunteers methodically record bird sightings at consistent locations around the world. Last winter’s count produced more than 36 million sightings of 671 bird species in the United States alone.

In a clever bit of science, Katovich compared the Christmas Bird Count numbers with data showing where wind turbines were built in America’s lower 48 states between 2000 and 2020. He did the same comparison for bird counts and new oil and gas extraction in shale fields — a process defined by the drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

His peer-reviewed study was published last month. The conclusions are fascinating.

Katovich found that wind energy development had no statistically significant effect on bird counts, or on the diversity of avian species within five kilometers of a Christmas Bird Count site. Fracking, on the other hand, did have an impact. The drilling of shale oil and gas wells “reduces the total number of birds counted in subsequent years by 15%,” Katovich wrote in the study.

In other words: Oil and gas drilling is worse for birds than wind power.And that’s without even getting into the consequences of burning fossil fuels. Audubon scientists have estimated that nearly two-thirds of North American bird species could go extinct if humanity doesn’t accelerate its transition from planet-warming fuels to climate-friendly energy such as wind and solar.

“The U.S. is now by far the world’s largest oil and gas producer,” Katovich told me. “This is another cost we should consider.”

Erik Katovich – Quantifying the Effects of Energy Infrastructure on Bird Populations and Biodiversity:

Shale oil and gas production and wind energy generation both expanded rapidly across the United States between 2000-2020, raising concerns over impacts on wildlife. I combine longitudinal micro-data from the National Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count with geolocated registries of all wind turbines and shale wells constructed in the contiguous US during this period to estimate the causal effects of these contrasting types of energy infrastructure on bird populations and biodiversity – key bellwethers of ecosystem health. Results show that the onset of shale oil and gas production reduces subsequent bird population counts by 15%, even after adjusting for location and year fixed effects, weather, counting effort, and anthropic land-use changes. Wind turbines do not have any measurable impact on bird counts. Negative effects of shale are larger when wells are drilled within important bird habitats.