Blaze Spinnaker <blazespinna...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Sure, but if the rate of windmill capacity doubled 7 more times or so, I > wouldn't want to be a bird. >
This really is not a problem. Birds are evolved to avoid whacking into large, opaque moving objects. Such as pine trees waving in the wind. In high winds, pine trees in Georgia move a meter or more toward the top. They do not kill any of the birds that are blown along by the high winds. The birds avoid them. They whack into reflective glass all the time, because that is not natural. They are killed by coal smoke because concentrated smoke from forest fires is rare in nature. In the 1970s, wind turbines were small and fast moving. Birds were cut to pieces by them. Modern turbines are slower compared to their total size. That is to say, a modern wind turbine moves quickly through the air, but it is huge, so you can see it a long way off, just as you can see the top of a moving pine tree blown in the wind. Birds have excellent vision. Better than people. Otherwise they could not fly. Many birds love getting blown in the wind, by the way. At some airports they hang around the jet blast runways. The jet engines start up and blow the birds spinning into the air, totally out of control, hundreds of meters away. The birds regain flight control, glide down, and flap back to the area near the runways, where they do it again. They seem to love it, like kids on a water slide. The annoy the airport maintenance people to no end. - Jed
