This article was originally featured on Knowable Magazine.
About twice a month, many of Australia’s wind farms receive an important visit from dogs and their handlers. The dogs are professionals and know exactly what they’re there for. Eagerly, they run along transects under the wind turbines, sniffing until they catch a scent then lying down, sitting or freezing once they’ve located their targets: the carcasses of bats and birds that were killed by turbine collisions.
For nearly two decades, wind and wildlife ecologist Emma Bennett’s company, Elmoby Ecology, has been using canines to count the victims of wind turbines in southern Australia. The numbers are troubling. Each turbine yields four to six bird carcasses per year, part of an overall death toll from wind turbines that likely tops 10,000 annually for the whole of Australia (not including carcasses carried away by scavengers). Such deaths are in the hundreds of thousands for North America. Far worse are the numbers of dead bats: The dogs find between six and 20 of these per turbine annually, with tens of thousands believed to die each year in Australia. In North America, the number is close to a million.
In fact, some experts predict that turbine collisions could drive certain bat species to extinction. “It’s the number one threat facing our small microbats,” Bennett says.
Numbers like these have caused strife in environmentalist circles, pitting those pushing for a rapid build-out of renewable energy—necessary to combat climate change—against those who oppose turbines due to their impact on wildlife; some bird conservation groups have frequently obstructed wind energy projects.
But experts stress that wildlife deaths from wind turbines aren’t inevitable. Over the past few decades, scientists have been investigating how and why collisions occur, through in-depth studies into bird and bat ecology and how the creatures sense obstacles in their…
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