Imagine there is an industry product that is killing thousands a year and the number is growing. The government is tracking it closely, while keeping the data secret in order to protect the product. Outrageous, right? But that is exactly the case with wind power killing eagles.
Every wind-killed eagle found at an industrial wind site is quickly reported to the federal Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). Every year each site also submits an annual kill report to FWS. None of this data is publicly available.
The FWS eagle kill data is all a big government secret designed to protect the wind industry from public outrage. This has to stop.
The public has a right to know about all these eagle kills. In addition, this data would support research on ways to reduce the killing. For example, it has been suggested that painting the blades black would help the eagles avoid the blades. In fact, there are a lot of technologies that could be studied given comprehensive kill data.
It is no secret where all this kill data is. It is all in one big FWS database called the Injury and Mortality Reporting System (IMR), but all you can do is enter your kill data. You cannot look at anyone else’s data such as all the kills in a given wind facility or group of facilities.
Important wind facility groups might include those using a given technology, or in a specific county or congressional district. There are lots of analyses that might be important, but only FWS can see all this data. It is a government secret.
Another approach should be to ask for specific kill data, but that does not work either. For example, the Wyoming based Albany County Conservancy (ACC) sent FWS a Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request for some very specific kill data from four wind projects.
When the response finally came, FWS said ACC could only see 256 pages or 22% of the 1156 pages that corresponded to their query. The other 910 pages were secret. The available 22% did not begin to answer their questions. The wind-kill data is simply secret.
In addition, every wind site has a permit to kill up to a specified number of eagles a year before preventive action must be taken. None of this data is publicly available either. There is not even a public map or list of permitted facilities that I can find, much less permit data available for analysis.
Ultimately, there is no way to see how many kills are being allowed on a local or regional basis, or to analyze these kill allowances for impact. The national numbers may be in the tens or hundreds of thousands.
Nor is the method used by FWS to calculate these kill allowances available for analysis as far as I can tell. They may be allowing too much killing. I can find no published research on this topic.
There is another point of interest in the kill permits. The FWS permit conditions state that the kill reports only have to find about a third of the actual kills.
Here is the standard permit language: “(1) Fatality Searches. (a) You must achieve an average annual site-wide probability of detection (accounting for spatial and temporal coverage, as well as potential scavenging or detection bias) of at least 35% for every Five-Year period during the permit tenure.”
At this 35% detection rate, the actual kills would be roughly three times those found! So they know the report numbers are way low. It is built in. Any research or findings based on the kill reports needs to take this likely low ball error into account. If a facility says 30 eagles were killed, it is fair to assume it was more like 90.
Wind power is killing a lot of eagles. The federal government is tracking this destruction, but it is all a big secret. We have a right to know what is happening to our eagles.
First published at CFACT.org.
