- A brand-new research study recommends a method to stop seabirds from hitting wind turbines: painting a black-and-white pattern on all 3 blades and the pylon to produce a flickering impact.
- This method has yet to be evaluated or carried out, however professionals think it has guarantee and would produce its preferred impact.
- However, getting approval for painting wind turbines can be challenging, and this mitigation method may create the unexpected impact of displacing seabirds, one professional says.
- It’s approximated that wind turbines eliminate countless birds in the U.K. alone.
Picture yourself driving down a regional highway, passing familiar street indications and experiencing normal traffic. Then, without caution, you discover a cow standing in the middle of the roadway. You slam on your brakes, however it’s far too late to prevent a crash.
Something comparable takes place to seabirds when they experience wind turbines, specifically when they’re looking down, instead of ahead, searching for food, says Graham Martin, an ornithologist and bird vision professional at the University of Birmingham in the U.K.
“If you’re an eagle and you’re flying along, you may have fantastic, high spatial resolution vision,” Martin informs Mongabay. “But if you turn your head to look down, you just don’t look where you’re going. But of course, that’s always worked [for birds] in the past; that’s never been a problem. It’s just now that we put things in the way for them.”
In a recent paper released in Global Ecology and Conservation, Martin and his associate, Alex Banks of Natural England, an independent federal government firm, proposed a brand-new method for reducing accidents in between seabirds and wind turbines. It includes painting a black-and-white pattern on turbines to produce a flickering impact while moving, therefore alerting birds of a turbine’s presence — and ideally decreasing deaths.
This method, which has yet to be evaluated, builds on an earlier idea from a 2020 study of painting one turbine blade black to lower bird deaths. Martin says he thinks this other method worked due to the fact that it likewise developed a flickering impact when the black blade relocated front of the white pylon. However, he says the method he proposes in the brand-new paper would create a more robust signal considering that all 3 blades and the pylon would be painted in a black-and-white pattern.
“It will go black, white, black, white as it rotates,” Martin says. “But equally, as the blade goes in front of the pylon … it’ll go black, white, black, white more frequently.”
The U.K. has almost 11,500 wind turbines, many situated on onshore wind farms. However, the federal government just recently proposed a substantial growth of overseas wind farms to produce sufficient wind capability to power every U.K. home. Martin says this growth will bring more seabirds into contact with wind turbines, which is why he and Banks composed their paper.
It’s estimated that countless birds are killed by wind turbines in the U.K. each year, however Martin says it’s tough to get a specific number.
“The rate is very difficult to tell partly because the birds are not coming through at a constant rate, and the weather makes a big difference, so we’re stuck with these very broad estimates that people come out with,” Martin says. “All we do know is that birds do fly into these [turbines].”
He includes it’s likewise challenging to evaluate the number of seabirds enter contact with wind turbines considering that gathering their remains at sea is difficult.
The research study recommends that specific seabirds are especially susceptible to these accidents, consisting of gulls, eagles, gannets, kittiwakes and skuas.
Rob Simmons, handling director of Birds & Bats Unlimited, a South African business that offers ecological assessments for wind farms, who was not associated with the research study, calls the proposed method “very clever.”
“If I had carte blanche here, I would recommend this strategy,” Simmons informed Mongabay. “Graham [Martin] has done a whole lifetime of assessments of vision in birds, and we would go for his research.”
However, Simmons says it can be challenging to persuade authorities to execute such methods. In South Africa, for example, he says it took lots of months of settlements with the South African Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to permit the painting of one blade on a number of existing turbines at a wind farm in Western Cape province, in an effort to secure threatened black harriers (Circus maurus). However, the CAA advised that just red paint, not black, might be utilized. So far, supervisors have actually painted 2 turbines and strategy to paint another 2 this year, Simmons says.
Tris Allinson, a senior international science officer at BirdLife International, who encourages on wind farm jobs however wasn’t associated with the brand-new research study, says it makes good sense to paint wind turbines according to Martin’s theory. However, he says that such a strategy might inadvertently displace birds.
“That becomes a problem if it’s denying these birds access to important foraging areas or denying them routes that they need to be moving across during their daily movements or their annual migrations,” Allinson informs Mongabay. “So collision is one problem, but displacement is another problem.”
Similar to Simmons, he says getting approval to paint wind turbines can be tough, specifically considering that they’re created to be “as unobtrusive visually as they can” to individuals who don’t desire them in their area.
There are other methods to hinder birds from flying into wind turbines, the easiest being properly preparing where to set up wind farms to prevent contact with birds, Allinson says. Some programs likewise aesthetically keep track of locations around wind farms — either with individuals or by computer system — and turned off the turbines when birds come near, which Allinson says is likewise really efficient. For circumstances, he says organizers effectively carried out these methods at a wind farm job in Egypt as part of the Migratory Soaring Birds Project.
“Hopefully, over time, it’ll become more standard practice,” he says, “and developers will, as a matter of standard practice, use cameras, use painted blades, use all of the mitigation measures that we know, and just do this more as part of the standard process of doing nature-safe wind energy.”
Elizabeth Claire Alberts is a senior staff author for Mongabay. Follow her on Twitter @ECAlberts.
Banner image: Birds flying through wind turbines. Image by David Dodge, Green Energy Futures through Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).
Citations:
Martin, G. R., & Banks, A. N. (2023). Marine birds: Vision-based wind turbine accident mitigation. Global Ecology and Conservation, 42, e02386. doi: 10.1016/j.gecco.2023.e02386
May, R., Nygård, T., Falkdalen, U., Åström, J., Hamre, Ø., & Stokke, B. G. (2020). Paint it black: Efficacy of increased wind turbine rotor blade exposure to lower bird deaths. Ecology and Evolution, 10(16), 8927-8935. doi: 10.1002/ece3.6592
