Twitchers given rare treat by turbine

Centuries from now – archaeologists and palaeontologists will be sifting through what were communities of isolated-candle-lit hovels and find the remains of the 21^st Century greentards and ecofascists that ended up living in the Stone Age poverty that they were ready to foist upon everybody else.

As they unravel the secrets of what led to the great wind power fraud – that will then be ancient history – the experts will be more than a little perplexed at how these people were able to generate foaming outrage – on the one hand – and benign indifference – on the other – when faced with identical avian outcomes.

Every time an oil rig blows up or an oil tanker runs aground – the greentard is the first to howl “blue murder” and demand an end to the oil industry as soon as birds start washing up on a beach drenched in the black stuff.

****

Photos and footage of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and the Exxon Valdez spill filled our papers and TV screens for years afterwards – with well-meaning environmentalists gently washing birds and other critters back to health. No criticism there – nothing wrong with a little human compassion for our feathered friends.

However – the game changes when the greentard is confronted with birds and bats being belted for 6 or sliced to ribbons by giant fans.

Something in the greentards’ wiring fails to connect turbines with the death and destruction they cause.

Is it good old hypocrisy? Is it selective thinking? Is it the fact that their simplistic world view reduces all equations to: “green” – GOOD and fossil fuel – BAD?

Whatever it is – it demonstrates an inability to apply logic to a given situation and the absence of any guiding principle – a point well made by James Lovelock.

If human activity causing death and harm to wildlife is abhorrent and cause for outrage in one circumstance – then – as a matter of principle – it should be abhorrent in all circumstances. Or does greentard thinking – if that’s what it is – reduce to the old chestnut about “the greater good”?

For some birds negotiating 56m blades with their outer tips doing over 350km/h is just case of keeping your head – or NOT. This little encounter with the wind industry was reported by James Delingpole a while back:

****

Well – maybe STT has missed something. Could there be an upside to these things when it comes to spotting and identifying birds and bats – with real precision?

“Twitchers” are a class of people who are prepared to spend days at a time stuck inside a smelly canvas tent living on cheese and onion sandwiches – armed with nothing more than binoculars and cameras – in the hope of sighting and recording something rare enough to repay their seemingly endless patience.

One of the problems with such fleeting sightings is confirming what it was the flew past the hide. Sometimes the sighting is short – or natural human failings mean that the bird spotters simply can’t be sure.

Thanks to turbine madness – much of that uncertainty has disappeared now for UK’s huge band of devoted twitchers. Rather than trying to spot something flying low and fast at a distance – they can simply walk up to the base of a turbine and collect their rare specimens for much closer inspection.

Back in June – news broke of a possible sighting of the White-Throated Needletail in the Hebrides, off the coast of Scotland.

Twitchers rushed to the island in question in the hope of spotting one of these rare little beauties. But these little fellas rip along at over 160km/h – which makes it hard to spot and harder to confirm as the subject of the sighting.

Here’s video – apparently – showing one on the wing.

Inconclusive proof, surely?

If that was the limit of what the spotters saw – then – no doubt there would have been a long night at the local pub arguing about just what it was that they saw.

However – luck is a fortune – and a nearby turbine came into its own by bringing this speedy little bird back to earth.

****

Here’s some more on the “exciting” moment by Will Robinson in the Daily Mail.

Not that video adds much when the subject is an Ex-White-Throated Needletail – here’s some footage of the spotters with their – otherwise – elusive quarry.

****

****

How much easier, to simply walk up and pick up your quarry? Here’s Delingpole’s slice on it.

Does away with hours of tedium and all those booze soaked arguments that follow inconclusive sightings – when you can bring your “prize” home in a Glad bag.

Not only do giant fans help eliminate uncertainty when it comes to the rarest of our feathered friends – they’ve also helped get people up close and personal to some of our more familiar airborne giants.

****

Sure they’re majestic in the air – but with the aid of a paddock full of turbines you get to pick them up and carry them home. Of course if you kill one without the aid of a turbine you’ll face 6 months imprisonment or a $10,000 fine. As the stories in these links show – when lads with a .22 do it – there is media “shock” and “outrage” at a crime worthy of condign punishment.

****

But when Kym Dixon collected this – formerly magnificent – victim of Energy Australia’s fans at Waterloo – the response from the media was “whatever” – with the exception of STT Champion, Graham Lloyd.

If you own a turbine you get to “cut” out (so to speak) any risk of time in stir.

Bats cop it too – with the pressure shock waves from the blades crushing their little lungs:

****

As these things go up around the Globe the numbers of birds and bats killed by turbine blades will only increase and reach hundreds of millions each year. In Spain alone, wind farms are killing between 6,000,000 and 18,000,000 birds every year. The figures come from 136 monitoring studies collected by the Spanish Ornithological Society. Here’s one take on the numbers killed by the Spectator.

A recent study in the US shows that the numbers of bird deaths accredited to turbines underestimates the true figure by more than 30%. (for the full story refer Smallwood, K Shawn. 2013. Comparing bird and bat fatality-rate estimates among North American wind-energy projects. Wildlife Society Bulletin 37: 19-33.)

Back to our poser: is it a kind of religious fervour that causes the greentard to ignore every negative aspect that comes with giant fans and that blinds them to the obvious environmental harm these monsters cause?

STT is struggling – given that wind power is an economic nonsense that can never replace fossil fuel power sources – we can’t see the “greater good” being served by any of this. All we see is a lot of birds and bats being walloped out of existence for no measurable benefit at all.