The dead birds and bats that enhance renewable resource — High Country News – Know the West

This story was initially released by Undark and is republished here through the Climate Desk collaboration.

“This is one of the least smelly carcasses,” said Todd Katzner, peering over his laboratory supervisor’s shoulder as she sliced a little bit of flesh from a dead pigeon pushing a steel laboratory table. The specimens that come to this center in Boise, Idaho, are typically long dead, and the bodies smell, he said, like “nothing that you can easily describe, other than yuck.”

A wildlife biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, a federal government firm devoted to ecological science, Katzner seen as his laboratory supervisor rooted around for the pigeon’s liver and after that put a shiny maroon piece of it in a little plastic bag identified with a biohazard sign. The pigeon is a presentation specimen, however samples, consisting of flesh and liver, are normally frozen, catalogued, and saved in freezers. The plumes get embeded paper envelopes and arranged in filing boxes; the remainder of the carcass is disposed of. When required for research study, the saved samples can be processed and sent to other laboratories that test for toxicants or carry out hereditary analysis.

Most of the bird carcasses that come to the Boise laboratory have actually been delivered from renewable resource centers, where numerous countless winged animals die each year in crashes with turbine blades and other equipment. Clean energy tasks are necessary for facing environment modification, said Mark Davis, a preservation biologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. But he likewise highlighted the value of alleviating their impacts on wildlife. “I’m supportive of renewable energy developments. I’m also supportive of doing our best to conserve biodiversity,” Davis said. “And I think the two things can very much coexist.”

To this end, Katzner, Davis, and other biologists are dealing with the renewable resource market to develop an across the country repository of dead birds and bats killed at wind and solar centers. The bodies hold ideas about how the animals lived and passed away, and might help researchers and job operators comprehend how to decrease the ecological effect of tidy energy setups, Davis said.

The repository requirements sustained financing and assistance from market partners to provide the specimens. But the collection’s broader capacity is huge, Davis included. He, Katzner, and other stakeholders hope the carcasses will provide a broad range of wildlife biologists access to the animal samples they require for their work, and possibly even offer insights into future clinical concerns that scientists haven’t believed yet to ask.

IN 1980, California prepared for among the world’s very first massive wind tasks when it designated more than 30,000 acres east of San Francisco for wind advancement, on a stretch of land called the Altamont Pass. Within twenty years, business had actually set up countless wind turbines there. But there was a drawback: While the ocean breeze made Altamont suitable for wind energy, the location was likewise well-used by nesting birds. Research recommended they were hitting the turbines’ turning blades, resulting in numerous deaths amongst red-tailed hawks, kestrels, and golden eagles.

“It’s a great place for a wind farm, but it’s also a really bad place for a wind farm,” said Albert Lopez, preparing director for Alameda County, where a number of the tasks lie.

A 2004 report gotten ready for the state approximated deaths and used suggestions that the authors said might amount to death decreases of anywhere from 20 to 50%. The most efficient option, the authors argued, included changing Altamont’s numerous little turbines with less bigger turbines. But, the authors composed, numerous steps to decrease deaths would be speculative, “due to the degree of uncertainty in their likely effectiveness.” More than a years of research study, stress, and lawsuits followed, concentrated on how to decrease deaths while still producing tidy electrical energy to help California satisfy its significantly ambitious environment objectives.

While all this was occurring, Katzner was making his Ph.D. by studying eagles and other birds — and starting to accumulate a plume collection midway all over the world. In Kazakhstan, where he has actually returned almost every summertime considering that 1997 to carry out field research study, Katzner saw stacks of plumes below the birds’ nests. Carrying details about a bird’s age, sex, diet plan, and more, they were too important a resource to simply leave, he believed, so he gathered them. It was the start of what he refers to as an obsession to store and archive possibly beneficial clinical product.

Katzner went on to co-publish a paper in 2007, in which the scientists performed a hereditary analysis of naturally shed plumes, a strategy that might permit researchers to match plume samples with the right bird types when visual recognitions are tough. He later on pulled deer carcasses throughout the East Coast to entice and trap golden eagles in order to track their migration patterns. And today, part of his research study includes screening carcasses for lead and other chemicals to comprehend whether birds are being available in contact with toxicants.

For the last years, Katzner has actually likewise looked into how birds engage with energy setups like wind and solar tasks. During this time, research studies have actually approximated that numerous countless birds pass away each year at such centers in the United States. Thats’s still a little portion of the countless birds that a minimum of one paper approximated are killed each year due to environment damage, downstream environment modification, and other effects of nonrenewable fuel source and nuclear reactor. But renewable resource is growing rapidly, and scientists are attempting to identify how that continued development may impact wildlife.

Bats appear drawn in to spinning wind turbines, often being struck by the blades while trying to roost in the towers. Birds often swoop down and crash into photovoltaic photovoltaic panels — perhaps believing the glass is water that is safe for landing. A different, less typical solar innovation that utilizes mirrors to focus the sun’s rays into heat is known to singe birds that fly too close — an aspect that has drawn opposition to such centers from bird activists. But researchers still don’t completely comprehend these numerous interactions or their influence on bird and bat populations, that makes it more difficult to avoid them.

In 2015, already on staff at the USGS, Katzner and a group of other researchers protected $1 million from the California Energy Commission to study the effects of renewable resource on wildlife — utilizing numerous carcasses from the Altamont Pass. NextAge Energy, among the biggest job owners there, cracked in a contribution of roughly 1,200 carcasses gathered from their centers in Altamont.

The group evaluated 411 birds gathered over a years at Altamont and another 515 got throughout a four-year duration at California solar tasks. They found that the birds stemmed from throughout the U.S., recommending eco-friendly centers might impact far bird populations throughout their migrations. In early 2021, Katzner and a group of other researchers released a paper taking a look at specimens gathered at wind centers in Southern California. Their results recommended that changing old turbines with less, more recent designs did not always decrease wildlife death. Where a task is sited and the quantity of energy it produces are most likely more powerful factors of casualty rates, the authors said.

In the Altamont, researchers are still working to comprehend effects for birds and bats, with a technical committee produced to manage the work. Ongoing efforts to change old turbines with more recent ones are suggested to decrease the variety of birds killed there, however whether it’s working stays an open concern, said Lopez. Installing less turbines that produce more energy per system than earlier designs was anticipated to offer less accident points for birds and more space for environment. And when brand-new turbines are put in, researchers can suggest areas within a task website where birds might be less most likely to face them. But other variables affect death aside from turbine size and spacing, according to the 2021 paper authored by Katzner and other researchers, like season, weather condition, and bird habits in the location.

On a little roadway in the Altamont, a white indication marks an entryway to NextAge’s Golden Hills wind job, where the business just recently changed decades-old turbines with brand-new, bigger designs. Not far, another wind job sits inactive — an antique from another time. Its old turbines stand stationary, stocky, and gray beside their stylish, contemporary followers on the horizon. The hills are peaceful other than for the fixed buzz of power cable televisions.

Some conservationists are still worried about the location. In 2021, the National Audubon Society, which says it highly supports renewable resource, sued over the approval of a brand-new wind job in the Altamont, asserting that the county didn’t do sufficient ecological evaluation or mitigation for bird deaths.

Katzner associates his operate in California with the starts of the repository, which he’s called the Renewables-Wildlife Solutions Initiative. Amy Fesnock, a Bureau of Land Management wildlife biologist who teams up with Katzner, just calls it the “dead body file.”

In Idaho, Katzner has actually already accumulated more than 80,000 samples — numerous drawn from the plume collection he’s kept for years, and thousands more just recently delivered in by renewable resource business and their partners. Ultimately, Katzner wish to see a group of repository areas, all linked by a database. This would permit other researchers to access the bird and bat samples and utilize them in a range of methods, extracting their DNA, for instance, or running toxicology tests.

“Every time we get an animal carcass, it has value to research,” said Katzner. “If I think about it from a scientific perspective, if you leave that carcass out there in the field, you’re wasting data.”

“If I think about it from a scientific perspective, if you leave that carcass out there in the field, you’re wasting data.”

That information is necessary to individuals like Amanda Hale, a biologist who assisted build the repository while at Texas Christian University. She is now a senior research study biologist at Western Ecosystems Technology, a speaking with business that, in addition to offering other services, studies for dead wildlife at renewable resource websites. Part of her brand-new function includes communicating with tidy energy business and the federal government firms that control them, ensuring choice makers have the most present science to notify tasks. Better information might help customers in assembling more precise preservation strategies and help firms understand what to search for, she said, making policy more uncomplicated.

“Once we can understand patterns of mortality, I think you can be better in designing and implementing mitigation strategies,” said Hale.

The effort is not without its doubters, however. John Anderson, executive director of the Energy and Wildlife Action Coalition, a clean energy membership group, sees merit in the effort but worries that the program could be “used to characterize renewable energy impacts in a very unfavorable light” without recognizing its benefits. The wind industry has long been sensitive to suggestions that it’s killing birds.

Several renewable energy companies that Undark contacted for this story did not respond to inquiries about wildlife monitoring at their sites or stopped responding to interview requests. Other industry groups, including the American Clean Power Association and the Renewable Energy Wildlife Institute, declined interview requests. But many companies appear to be participating — in Idaho, Katzner has received birds from 42 states.

William Voelker, a member of the Comanche Nation who has led a bird and feather repository called Sia for decades, says he’s frustrated at the lack of consideration for tribes from these types of U.S. government initiatives. Indigenous people, he said, have first right to “species of Indigenous concern.” His repository catalogs and sends bird carcasses and feathers to Indigenous people for ceremonial and religious purposes, and Voelker also cares for eagles.

“At this point we just don’t have any voice in the ring, and it’s unfortunate,” said Voelker.

“At this point we just don’t have any voice in the ring, and it’s unfortunate.”

Katzner, for his part, says he wants the project to be collaborative. The Renewable-Wildlife Solutions Initiative has sent some samples to a repository in Arizona that provides feathers for religious and ceremonial purposes, he said, and the RWSI archive could ship out other materials that it does not archive, but it has not yet contacted other locations to do so.

“It’s a shame if those parts of birds are not being used,” he said. “I’d like to see them get used for science or cultural purposes.” 

MANY U.S. WIND FARMS already monitor and collect downed wildlife. At a California wind facility an hour north of Altamont, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District tries to clear out its freezers at least once per year — before the bodies start to smell, said Ammon Rice, a supervisor in the government-owned utility’s environmental services department. The specimens that companies accumulate are often kept until they’re thrown out. Until recently, samples had been available to government and academic researchers on only a piecemeal basis.

There are many reasons why a clean energy company might employ people to pick up dead animals at its facility: Some states require companies to survey sites during certain stages of their development and keep track of how many birds and bats are found dead. Removing the carcasses can also deter scavengers, such as coyotes, foxes, and vultures. And the federal government has set voluntary conservation guidelines for wind projects; for some companies, complying with the recommendations is part of maintaining good political relationships.

Most of the time, human searchers canvas a project, walking transects under turbines or through solar fields. It’s “enormously labor intensive,” said Trevor Peterson, a senior biologist at Stantec, one of the consulting firms often hired to conduct those surveys. On some sites, trained dogs sniff out the dead bodies.

For years, conservation biologists have wanted to find a use for the creatures languishing in freezers at clean energy sites around the country. To get a nationwide project off the ground, Katzner started working with two other researchers: Davis, the conservation biologist at University of Illinois, and Amanda Hale, then a biology professor at Texas Christian University. They were part of a small community of people “who pick up dead stuff,” said Katzner. The three started meeting, joined by scientists at the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who helped connect the effort with additional industry partners willing to send carcasses.

Building on Katzner’s existing samples, the repository has grown from an idea to a small program. In the last two years, it received about $650,000 from the Bureau of Land Management and earned a mention in the agency’s recent report to Congress about its progress towards renewable energy growth.

Davis had already been accepting samples from wind facilities when he started working on the repository. Often the bodies are mailed to his laboratory, however he prefers to organize hand-to-hand deliveries when possible, after one ill-fated incident in which a colleague received a shipped box of “bat soup.” To receive deliveries in person, Davis often winds up loitering in the university parking lot, waiting for the other party to arrive so they can offload the cargo.

“It sounds a lot like an illicit drug deal,” said Davis. “It looks a lot like an illicit drug deal — I assure you it is not.”

Recently, Ricky Gieser, a field technician who works with Davis, drove two and a half hours from Illinois to central Indiana to meet an Ohio wildlife official in the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel. Davis arranged for Undark to witness the exchange through Zoom. With latex-gloved hands, Gieser transferred bags of more than 300 frozen birds and bats — lifting them from state-owned coolers and then gingerly placing them into coolers owned by his university. The entire transaction was over in under 15 minutes, but coordinating it took weeks.

Davis studies bats and other “organisms that people don’t like,” with a focus on genetics. He grew up in Iowa chasing spiders and snakes and now stores a jar of pickled rattlesnakes — a souvenir from his doctoral research — on a shelf behind his desk. Protecting these creatures, he said, is of extreme importance. Bats provide significant economic benefit, eating up bugs that harm crops. And their populations are declining at an alarming rate: A disease called white-nose syndrome has wiped out more than 90% of the population of three North American bat species in the last decade. In late November of 2022, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed Davis’s favorite species, the northern long-eared bat, as endangered.

For certain species, deaths at wind facilities are another stressor on populations. Scientists expect climate change to make the situation worse for bats and overall biodiversity. “Because of this confluence of factors, it’s just really tough for bats right now,” said Davis. “We need to work a lot harder than we are to make life better for them.”

Like other wildlife researchers, Davis has sometimes struggled to get his hands on the specimens he needs to track species and understand their behaviors. Many spend time in the field, but that’s costly. Depending on the target species, acquiring enough animals can take years, said Davis. He used museum collections for his doctoral dissertation, and still views them as an “untapped font of research potential.” But museums often focus on keeping samples intact for preservation and future research, so they may not work for every project.

That leaves salvage. Frozen bird and bat carcasses are “invaluable” to scientists, said Fesnock, the BLM wildlife biologist. So far, samples collected as part of the Renewables-Wildlife Solutions Initiative have led to about 10 scientific papers, according to Katzner. Davis says the collection might reduce research costs for some scientists by making a large number of samples available, particularly for species that are hard to collect. It’s difficult for scientists to catch migratory bats that fly high in the air with nets, making it challenging to estimate population levels. Bat biologists say there’s much we still don’t know about their behaviors, range, and number.

AS SCIENTISTS WORK to compile better data, a few companies are experimenting with mechanization as a possible way to reduce fatalities at their facilities. At a wind farm in Wyoming, utility Duke Energy has actually installed a rotating camera that resembles R2D2 on stilts. The technology, called IdentiFlight, is designed to use artificial intelligence to identify birds and shut turbines down in seconds to avoid collisions.

Prior to IdentiFlight, technicians used to set up lawn chairs amid the 17,000-acre site and look skyward, sometimes eight hours a day, to track eagles. It was an inefficient system prone to human error, said Tim Hayes, who recently retired as the utility’s environmental development director. IdentiFlight has actually reduced eagle fatalities there by 80%, he added. “It can see 360 degrees, where humans can’t, and it never gets tired, never blinks, and never has to go to the bathroom.”

Biologists say there are still unknowns around the efficacy of these types of technologies, in part because of incomplete data on the population size and spread of winged wildlife.

Katzner and his colleagues want the repository to help change this, but first they will need long term funding to help recruit more partners and staff. Davis estimated he needs between $1 and $2 million to build a sustainable repository at his university alone. Ideally, the USGS portion of the project in Boise would have its own building. For now, Katzner stores feathers in a space that doubles as a USGS conference room. Next door, in a room punctuated with a dull hum, the walls are lined with freezers. Some carry samples already cataloged. Others hold black trash bags filled with bird and bat bodies just waiting to be processed.

Emma Foehringer Merchant is a journalist who covers climate change, energy and the environment. Her work has actually appeared in the Boston Globe Magazine, Inside Climate News, Greentech Media, Grist and other outlets. We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at [email protected] or send a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.