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Wind power is killing a lot of eagles. The US 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, writes David Wojick.
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By way of introduction to Wojick’s article that follows, we highlight the destruction caused by so-called “green” or “renewable” energy.
Wind turbines can spin up to 200 mph at their tips, posing a significant threat to birds. A 2013 study estimated that up to 328,000 birds are killed annually across the US by monopole turbines. Another study estimates that approximately 681,000 birds are killed by wind turbines in the US each year. A more recent study modelled the death rate at the start of 2021 and concluded that 1.17 million birds are killed by wind turbines in the US each year.
The case against NextEra demonstrates how wantonly destructive wind farm operators are. In 2022, a subsidiary of NextEra Energy, ESI Energy, pleaded guilty to killing at least 150 eagles at its wind farms across eight states in the US over the previous decade. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act and the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act prohibit killing, capturing or transporting protected migratory bird species without a permit. ESI Energy failed to obtain necessary permits and took no steps to protect eagles, giving it an advantage over competitors that did take such steps.
Read more:
- Conventional Wind Energy – A Design Deadly for Birds, American Eagle Foundation
- How Many Birds Are Killed by Wind Turbines? American Bird Conservancy, 26 January 2021
- Wind energy company pleads guilty to killing at least 150 eagles, The Guardian, 11 April 2022
- Our Hero – A little bird in Australia defeats Net Zero Zealots, The Exposé, 19 December 2022
- Wind farms are destroying wildlife while environmental organisations accept millions of dollars from wind energy companies, The Exposé, 7 October 2023
- Labour unilaterally overturns restrictions on onshore wind turbines, The Exposé, 10 July 2024
- Starmer pushes ahead with a state-owned “green energy” investment company which will be devastating to nature, The Exposé, 26 July 2024
The Feds Are Hiding the Eagle Death Data
By David Wojick as published by The Heartland Institute on 3 April 2025
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 analyse 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 need 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.
About the Author
David Wojick is a former consultant with the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the US Department of Energy in the area of information and communication science.
A fuller biography can be found on DeSmog HERE. It should be noted that DeSmog’s aim is to document “climate science denial.” It maintains several databases of people and organisations engaged in “misinformation” and lobbying against “addressing climate change.” DeSmog is a partner in the Covering Climate Now project, which organises and assists news organisations (such as The New York Times, The Guardian, BBC and Forbes) in covering climate change worldwide. DeSmog continues to expand its focus to other areas of “misinformation” such as meeting the world’s energy needs and confronting “environmental racism.” In short, DeSmog is an establishment mouthpiece; its sole purpose is to propagate the establishment’s narrative. It is in this context that the information DeSmog publishes must be read so that the establishment misinformation and disinformation that pollute its blogs can be filtered out accordingly.
Featured image: A Golden Eagle flies near wind turbines. Source: For Golden Eagles, It’s Poorly Sited Wind Turbines that Spell Trouble, American Bird Conservancy, 29 August 2024
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The US has been ruled by a criminal government shrouded in secrecy and engaged in sabotage against it’s own people and all living creatures herein. The USDA and FWS have been staffed by morons and state operatives to do anything but conserve and see to the wellbeing of our forests and wildlife. Here are two examples of my own with these idiots:
I own a large rural property, some of which runs alongside a public roadway. There is a very beautiful and natural wetlands at the base of a steep mountain which supported a healthy beaver population, a rarity anymore especially in the eastern US. The beavers in their usual business had built their berm housing that was stopping the culvert runoff, so water was coming across the road. I caught a FWS officer killing the beavers to “solve” the problem. On private property without ever contacting me. After I browbeat him, I forbid him and anyone else from his agency from shooting another beaver or coming onto my property to do it. I made several legal and personal threats against him, the FWS and the USDA. That put an end to that. The highway department came and put a baffle in at the culver which solved the problem without killing wildlife.
Last year I found a junior bear in my sheep barn one night. He was sleeping in the hayloft. It was during lambing season so my immediate concern was for their safety. I could see the bear had serious skin and fur disease, when he awoke, he was scratching and seemed to be acting crazy. I called FWS for assistance…..no help there, the cruddy bastards. Upon further investigation, I learned that the junior bear population of our mountains had contracted the mange. This disease can cause great distress to an animal including them going crazy because of the mites burrowing in their skin. Then they starve to death. Within the next few months I encountered a good number of junior bears where they never were before, miserable and actually running in circles with madness. I called NWS and inquired what solutions they were giving to these poor bears. None they said, they were only in the business of collecting fines, issuing regulations and selling licenses. The FWS has wildlife biologists and veterinarians on their staff. Why were they not working on a remedy for this(and I don’t mean wholesale butchery), the remedy for mange is quite cheap and could have been established in known bear habitats. Worthless and lazy public employees.
So it does not surprise me that these silly wind towers are both killing eagles and whales when they are in the ocean like off the Atlantic coastline. Rhoda Wilson did a previous article where Dominion Power who owned those wind towers was hiding the number of whales being killed. All the work of criminal elements in industry and government. A plague on both their houses
And the beat goes on…
Disgraceful, one eagle is too many, such a majestic beautiful creature.
A pity they are not wiping out lefties and corrupt politicians
Birds learn what they are able to do. What about the unpleasant alternative for humans or have we been overlooked?
Do you remember some years ago when Trump suggested that this could happen and people on the left scoffed at him? Once again, Trump was right.
Wind energy company kills 150 bald eagles
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/04/green-energy-company-pleads-guilty-wind-farms-kill-150-bald-eagles/
https://web.archive.org/web/20221001111812/https://americanlookout.com/green-energy-company-pleads-guilty-after-their-wind-farms-kill-150-bald-eagles/
IN-DEPTH: ‘It’s Criminal’: Central Wisconsin Communities Unite to Stave Off Looming Wind Turbine Industry
https://www.theepochtimes.com/in-depth-its-criminal-central-wisconsin-communities-unite-to-stave-off-looming-wind-turbine-industry_5268714.html
Massachusetts 40 Years Of Wind Turbine Failures Starting On Cuttyhunk Island 1975 https://patch.com/massachusetts/falmouth/massachusetts-40-years-wind-turbine-failures-starting-cuttyhunk-island-1975