Attempts at green growth are killing off the bird population no matter location

IN 1980, California laid the groundwork for one of the world’s first large-scale wind projects when it designated more than 30,000 acres east of San Francisco for wind development, on a stretch of land called the Altamont Pass. Within two decades, companies had installed thousands of wind turbines there. But there was a downside: While the sea breeze made Altamont ideal for wind energy, the area was also well-used by nesting birds. Research suggested they were colliding with the turbines’ rotating blades, leading to hundreds of deaths among red-tailed hawks, kestrels, and golden eagles.

“It’s a great place for a wind farm, but it’s also a really bad place for a wind farm,” said Albert Lopez, planning director for Alameda County, where many of the projects are located.

A 2004  prepared for the state estimated deaths and offered recommendations that the authors said could add up to mortality reductions of anywhere from 20 to 50 percent. The most effective solution, the authors argued, involved replacing Altamont’s many small turbines with fewer larger turbines. But, the authors wrote, many measures to reduce deaths would be experimental, “due to the degree of uncertainty in their likely effectiveness.” More than a decade of research, tensions, and litigation followed, focused on how to reduce fatalities while still producing clean electricity to help California meet its increasingly  climate goals.

While all this was happening, Katzner was earning his Ph.D. by studying eagles and other birds — and beginning to amass a feather collection halfway around the world. In Kazakhstan, where he has returned nearly every summer since 1997 to conduct field research, Katzner noticed piles of feathers underneath the birds’ nests. Carrying information about a bird’s age, sex, diet, and more, they were too valuable a resource to just leave behind, he thought, so he collected them. It was the start of what he describes as a compulsion to store and archive potentially useful scientific material.

Katzner went on to co-publish a  in 2007, in which the researchers conducted a genetic analysis of naturally shed feathers, a technique that could allow scientists to match feather samples with the correct bird species when visual identifications are difficult. He later towed deer carcasses across the East Coast to lure and trap golden eagles in order to track their migration patterns. And today, part of his research involves testing carcasses for lead and other chemicals to understand whether birds are coming in contact with toxicants.

For the last decade, Katzner has also researched how birds interact with energy installations like wind and solar projects. During this time, studies have estimated that hundreds of thousands of birds die each year at such facilities in the United States. Thats’s still a small fraction of the millions of birds that at least one  estimated are killed annually due to habitat destruction, downstream climate change, and other impacts of fossil fuel and nuclear power plants. But renewable energy is , and researchers are trying to determine how that continued growth might affect wildlife.

Bats seem attracted to spinning wind turbines, sometimes being struck by the blades while attempting to roost in the towers. Birds sometimes swoop down and crash into photovoltaic solar panels — possibly thinking the glass is water that is safe for landing. A separate, less common solar technology that uses mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays into heat energy is  singe birds that fly too close — a factor that has  to such facilities from bird activists. But scientists still don’t fully understand these many interactions or their impacts on bird and bat populations, which makes it harder to prevent them.

In 2015, by then on staff at the USGS, Katzner and a team of other scientists secured $1 million from the California Energy Commission to study the impacts of renewable energy on wildlife — using hundreds of carcasses from the Altamont Pass. NextEra Energy, one of the largest project owners there, chipped in a donation of approximately 1,200 carcasses collected from their facilities in Altamont.

The team analyzed 411 birds collected over a decade at Altamont and another 515 picked up during a four-year period at California solar projects. They  that the birds originated from across the U.S., suggesting renewable facilities could affect far away bird populations during their migrations. In early 2021, Katzner and a team of other scientists published a  examining specimens collected at wind facilities in Southern California. Their results suggested that replacing old turbines with fewer, newer models did not necessarily reduce wildlife mortality. Where a project is sited and the amount of energy it produces are likely stronger determinants of fatality rates, the authors said.

In the Altamont, scientists are still working to understand impacts for birds and bats, with a technical committee created to oversee the work. Ongoing efforts to replace old turbines with newer ones are meant to reduce the number of birds killed there, but whether it’s working remains an open question, said Lopez. Installing fewer turbines that produce more energy per unit than earlier models was expected to provide fewer collision points for birds and more space for habitat. And when new turbines are put in, scientists can recommend spots within a project site where birds may be less likely to run into them. But other variables influence mortality aside from turbine size and spacing, according to the 2021 paper authored by Katzner and other scientists, like season, weather, and bird behavior in the area.

On a small road in the Altamont, a white sign marks an entrance to NextEra’s Golden Hills wind project, where the company recently replaced decades-old turbines with new, larger models. Not far away, another wind project sits dormant — a relic from another time. Its old turbines stand motionless, stocky, and gray next to their graceful, modern successors on the horizon. The hills are quiet except for the static buzz of power cables.

Some conservationists are still concerned about the area. In 2021, the National Audubon Society, which says it strongly supports renewable energy,  over the approval of a new wind project in the Altamont, asserting that the county didn’t do enough environmental review or mitigation for bird fatalities.

Katzner attributes his work in California with the beginnings of the repository, which he’s dubbed the Renewables-Wildlife Solutions Initiative. Amy Fesnock, a Bureau of Land Management wildlife biologist who collaborates with Katzner, simply calls it the “dead body file.”

In Idaho, Katzner has already amassed more than 80,000 samples — many drawn from the feather collection he’s kept for decades, and thousands more recently shipped in by renewable energy companies and their partners. Ultimately, Katzner would like to see a group of repository locations, all connected by a database. This would allow other scientists to access the bird and bat samples and use them in a variety of ways, extracting their DNA, for example, or running toxicology tests.

“Every time we get an animal carcass, it has value to research,” said Katzner. “If I think about it from a scientific perspective, if you leave that carcass out there in the field, you’re wasting data.”