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You do realize that you're linking to someone's blog, not an established news source? And that the author literally cites scientists that "poisoning from scavenging carcasses tainted by lead ammunition is likely responsible for many of the [bird] deaths", before wondering why "nobody" is concerned about windmills.

Well, here's the reason: As has been established repeatedly, the number of birds killed by windmills (on the order of half a million a year in the entire US) is completely dwarfed by, say, the number of birds killed by windows (on the order of one billion ), not to mention cars and cats.

That's not to say that people are not concerned with birds killed by wind mills, too. (And bats, porpoises and other animals.) The problem is fortunately entirely manageable by choosing appropriate locations for wind farms and other precautions. In particular, the construction (like all big construction) is a much bigger environmental issue than the actual operation of the windmills. E.g. here's Siemens Wind Power describing a solution to minimize noise pollution for endangered porpoise populations and other marine life during construction of off-shore wind farms.

(Then there's that other growing threat to birds: Climate change. Which is why the Massachusetts Audubon Society supported the Cape Wind project.)

Domestic cats don't kill eagles and other typical endangered species of bird.

Domestic cats most certainly do kill endangered species of birds. They may not kill eagles but the certainly kill other threatened species in substantial numbers. Cats are an invasive species and a poorly controlled one at that.

Let us not also forget about bats,

Same deal as with birds. Windmills are simply not a significant threat to their populations.

and the fact that renewable provide a tiny amount of energy today.

You think 10% of US energy consumption is a tiny number? I think you don't understand the definition of the word "tiny".

Bird collisions kill millions of migratory birds. Especially power-lines:
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/4544...
but wind turbines quickly catching up:
https://abcbirds.org/threat/bi...

It is true, cats are killing a lot too. A stray pet cat is a formidable predator, - that is why in some countries stray cats are illegal. Birds are different from humans, and some loss of younglings is inevitable. However power-lines, and now more and more wind turbines, decimate the strongest ones, who survived, grew up, and are capable to fly thousand of kilometers.

Even without these additional hazards only 30 - 70 % of them make it depending of a year. And we doom them as species with these invisible for them tall obstacles.

Better have a moratorium on building construction too: "An estimated 300 million to 1 billion birds die each year from collisions with glass on buildings, from skyscrapers to homes. Birds simply can’t tell reflection from reality. Even if a bird flies away after striking a window, it may die elsewhere as a result of the collision." Source: http://www.abcbirds.org/abcpro...

More data on deaths from collisions with wind turbines, towers, power lines, roads and vehicles, urban lights, and glass here: http://goldengateaudubon.org/c... Looks like glass on buildings, roads, and vehicles are more deadly to birds.

glyphosate is a large part of Monsanto's argument for more roundup-resistant weeds^W GMO crops. It's proven to have a nasty track record of encouraging superweeds, it doesn't decompose naturally & quickly in the soil as once promised to farmers, and it's certainly not benign in its destruction of symbiotic organisms naturally found in soil. Monsanto is a poison peddler and their entire business model requires duping the masses into doublethinking "safety" whenever questions arise.

The problem with wind farms isn't just the silly people surrounding it but the ecological risks and damage done. In NA our bat populations are critically endangered and being destroyed by the pressure differential caused by various wind farms, if you bother to count the bodies. It sounds OK until you realize that bats are incredibly useful, they pollinate more than bees do, they control more insect pest populations than anything else. A single bat can eat many thousands of mosquitoes in a night.

In countries with more wind farms the damage is magnified. See Costa Rica. If only more people even gave a shit.

Do you have actual data to back up how many bats are being killing by wind gennies? I recalled people opposed to wind gennies saying they killed a lot of birds. However studies have shown cats kill more birds than wind generators. The article Do wind turbines kill birds? has a chart of statistics showing how many birds are killed by different things, from cars, wild and feral cats (but not pet cats?), to windows. Some may have a problem with the chart though, out of seven killers of birds 5 of the statistics are provided by the American Wind Energy Association, one by treehugger, and one by American Bird Conservancy. Sciam asks the question Are Wind Turbines Getting More Bird and Bat-Friendly? It partially answers by saying stake holders from AWEA, ABC, and National Audubon are working on ways to reduce bird and bat mortality rates.

Falcon

Oh, God -- got to love an article that starts out talking about wind power by bringing up Altamont Pass. Altamont Pass was a *1970s* wind farm. It was built with very little study (unlike today's requirements), and if you wanted to design a rapor cuisinart, that would be the way you would do it. They built it in the middle of a raptor flyway with low turbines with fast-spinning blades and a tower structure that encouraged birds to try to land on them. Comparing Altamont Pass to modern wind farms is just absurd. Despite them generating a tiny fraction of our wind power, Altamont and a couple other old farms cause over 80% of wind-related raptor deaths.

Then they bring up the American Bird Conservatory. The American Bird Conservatory, like the Audubon Society, supports wind power when it's designed with birds in mind. The very paper that ABC cites for their numbers ("A Summary and Comparison of Bird Mortality from Anthropogenic Causes with an Emphasis on Collisions") states "The high level of mortality associated with the Altamont wind plant has not been documented at newer wind plants constructed at other sites." The paper's conclusions are amazingly *supportive* of wind turbines (noting, for example, that wind turbines average 1.5 bird fatalities per year, while communication towers average 8.1). They come up with a figure of 3.04 bird fatalities per MW per year for wind power. They estimate that wind power killed 20-37k birds per year as of the 6.4GW installed capacity as of 2003 (compared to the 500M-1B birds killed by anthropogenic causes alone). ABC's "1 million birds" number is nowhere in the first paper that they cite. One can only conclude that they did some crazy extrapolation which was heavily biased by Altamont and other early wind farms which did not consider birds in their designs and used older, fast-turning blades. They also mention another paper by FWS, but fail to give a proper reference to it; I searched the FWS's site and can find nothing to back it up.

That whole WSJ article is based on a big lie -- that only wind power gets an exemption from bird kills. In the US, cars kill 60-80m birds per year, with more from planes and trains. 100m to 1b birds in the US per year die from window strikes. The number for US high tension lines is roughly 130m. For communication towers, the estimate is 4-5m (and rapidly growing). 67m are estimated to die from pesticides. And on and on. How many of these death sources do you think are getting sued?

Oh, God -- got to love an article that starts out talking about wind power by bringing up Altamont Pass. Altamont Pass was a *1970s* wind farm. It was built with very little study (unlike today's requirements), and if you wanted to design a rapor cuisinart, that would be the way you would do it. They built it in the middle of a raptor flyway with low turbines with fast-spinning blades and a tower structure that encouraged birds to try to land on them. Comparing Altamont Pass to modern wind farms is just absurd. Despite them generating a tiny fraction of our wind power, Altamont and a couple other old farms cause over 80% of wind-related raptor deaths.

Then they bring up the American Bird Conservatory. The American Bird Conservatory, like the Audubon Society, supports wind power when it's designed with birds in mind. The very paper that ABC cites for their numbers ("A Summary and Comparison of Bird Mortality from Anthropogenic Causes with an Emphasis on Collisions") states "The high level of mortality associated with the Altamont wind plant has not been documented at newer wind plants constructed at other sites." The paper's conclusions are amazingly *supportive* of wind turbines (noting, for example, that wind turbines average 1.5 bird fatalities per year, while communication towers average 8.1). They come up with a figure of 3.04 bird fatalities per MW per year for wind power. They estimate that wind power killed 20-37k birds per year as of the 6.4GW installed capacity as of 2003 (compared to the 500M-1B birds killed by anthropogenic causes alone). ABC's "1 million birds" number is nowhere in the first paper that they cite. One can only conclude that they did some crazy extrapolation which was heavily biased by Altamont and other early wind farms which did not consider birds in their designs and used older, fast-turning blades. They also mention another paper by FWS, but fail to give a proper reference to it; I searched the FWS's site and can find nothing to back it up.

That whole WSJ article is based on a big lie -- that only wind power gets an exemption from bird kills. In the US, cars kill 60-80m birds per year, with more from planes and trains. 100m to 1b birds in the US per year die from window strikes. The number for US high tension lines is roughly 130m. For communication towers, the estimate is 4-5m (and rapidly growing). 67m are estimated to die from pesticides. And on and on. How many of these death sources do you think are getting sued?

Cats are lazy and will kill the easiest pray, including song birgs.

People just need to keep their pets on a leash.

you have problem of transmitting power from where you can produce it, to the place where it needs to be employed

HVDC, High Voltage DC powerlines can transmit electricity log distances.

Also, you still need some way to ensure a stable baseline of power - power that you can count on producing a minimum amount, all hours of the day or night, every day of the year. Coal, oil, nuclear, and geothermal offer that

As you say geothermal can provide at least some baseload as can natural gas. Geothermal provides power in California. Geothermal provides 13,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity. One geothermal power plant on the Big Island in Hawaii provides 25% of it's electricity. And in New York City geothermal energy is used to heat homes.

Finally, have environmentalists considered the impact of the land use necessary to produce electricity on the scale our nation needs using solar and wind?

Actually now many environmentalists now support nuclear power.

How many birds will be hacked to death by wind turbines

Cats are now a bigger threat to birds than wind turbines. Actually it was some of the older wind turbines that killed a lot of birds. Today they're made with bigger blades that spin slower, it was the fast spinning blades that killed birds.

Maybe bird migrations will be confused by all the glare from PV panels?

Birds are already confused by the windows on buildings.

Where are the UK, France, Germany, etc going to build their solar and wind farms?

Much of Germany has good potential wind energy. A German town is going 100% Renewable Power.

Falcon