File this one under “unintended but entirely foreseeable consequences.” In Wyoming, a group that monitors the populations of eagles and other raptors is sounding a warning: The Cowboy State’s population of Golden Eagles (Aquila chrysaetos) is crashing, having dropped by a third. And that group, the Teton Raptor Center, thinks they know why.
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Wyoming’s Golden Eagles are in trouble and need the protection of the Endangered Species Act. That things are going badly for the eagles is no secret, but the Wyoming authorities are ignoring this rapidly growing threat.
Incredibly, Golden Eagle numbers in Wyoming have declined by nearly a third over the past 20 years according to Teton Raptor Center conservation director, Bryan Bedrosian. This precipitous population drop is clearly serious and must be stopped. Wyoming is America’s Golden Eagle population center, so what happens there potentially affects us all.
Now, I’ll add a bit of a qualifier; this refers only to the population in Wyoming. The Golden Eagle is a circumpolar species, found in the northern hemisphere in North America, Asia, and parts of Europe. This is still, however, a matter of concern, especially when given the reason for the decline.
Here is their special warning with respect to wind power development:
“Wyoming is home to the largest breeding population of Golden Eagles in the lower 48 states and provides critical habitat for wintering and migrating individuals; the state contains some of the most valuable areas for long-term conservation in the western United States.”
“Inadequate protections in a Golden Eagle stronghold experiencing high growth in wind development risks the project area becoming a “population sink” (aka: ecological trap) – an area Golden Eagles are strongly attracted to where they experience high mortality, leading to continued population level declines. When year-round breeding eagles experience mortalities, ‘floater’ eagles are likely to be the ones that fill territory vacancies, which themselves also face the same fate, a downward population spiral becomes possible.”
These dire warnings and many others like them have been ignored by the relevant authorities, so it is time to call in the Endangered Species Act.
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Indeed.
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These wind farms kill an untold number of birds, with the big, soaring raptors like eagles and some of the big hawks of genus Buteo particularly at risk. The very open, windy environments these wind farms are put up in are great hunting grounds for the big birds, and their long, broad wings, made for soaring, are very vulnerable to strikes by the huge blades of these mills. And, unless an eagle lives through the strike and is found by a rehab group, a broken wing is a death sentence. One of the prices birds pay for flight is light, fragile, hollow bones, and once a wing is broken, it almost never heals.
And “untold” means literally that; the United States Fish & Wildlife Service is strangely reluctant to release the numbers. But in Wyoming, home to the United States’ biggest population of these magnificent birds, it’s growing alarming. And remember – all of this for an electricity source that is intermittent (although, we have to admit, rather less intermittent in Wyoming than in many places), low energy density, unreliable, expensive, and which comes at a far higher environmental cost than the green energy advocates like to admit.
So where are the environmental lobbyists now? Other than the Teton Raptor Center, arguably an environmental group although a rather focused one, they have been strangely silent.
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The state of Wyoming seems unwilling to take this problem on. The Endangered Species Act, since its inception, hasn’t always been fairly or evenly applied, but in this case, we would seem to have an issue that the ESA was actually intended to address.
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