Interesting, how large is the zone of low pressure behind the blades which is killing the bats? It seems like the blades would be churning the air enough to convince animals to leave that area alone, but apparently not.

they are not high torque blades, so they don't make very much wind. the pressure zone is 100 square feet, i think.

it's also worth noting that in high winds we have less kills. there's a strategy called curtailment that we advocate...if the wind speed is less than 5m/s, then we shut down the turbines. it cuts kills down by an average of 80%.

Not to say you're not chasing a noble dream, but I'm with George on this one.

I mean, say you obliterate an entire species of predator. That predator's place in the food chain will never be replaced, the prey will thrive out of control and unchecked for a while until option 1 happens or the environment can't sustain the prey's population any more.

Not to say you're not chasing a noble dream, but I'm with George on this one.

PS, I hate pandas and the attention they get. They're "cute", sure, but people seem to forget that behind that cute fur IS A FUCKING BEAR. Oh, and they're too dumb/lazy to reproduce. Eff them.

pandas are actually on the rise in the wild.

either way, i know you arnt being serious, but i really hope pandas make it.

pandas are actually on the rise in the wild.

either way, i know you arnt being serious, but i really hope pandas make it.

hey guys.

so the project i'm working on now is for a study of interactions with bats and windmills. I work for bat conservation international, see their crap at batcon.org. this is an AWESOME company. every bit of information they get and write is public information. anyways.

not only are bats dying from white nose syndrome (it has since spread to other bat species, including two endangered myotis species), but they die at windmills, too. there is a pressure change zone behind the blades, directly on top of the turbine, and when the bats fly through there, they die from barometric pressure trauma. if you guys swim, it's basically the same thing as the bends. often these bats will have blood out of their orifices. we do have some direct strikes, but it is less than 10% of the finds we have.

to put in perspective, today, the beginning of the fall migration, we found 25 bats on 51 turbines. that doesn't include the bats we didn't see, scavengers got, or ones on the turbines we didn't search. over the 4 years this study has been going, we call an average of 50 bats/turbine/year. so this site alone (which is one of the highest killing rates in all of the eastern US) averages a minimum of 2500 bat deaths a year, ranging from red bats, seminole bats, hoary bats, silver-haired bats, tri-colored bats, little brown bats, big brown bats, and occasionally northern myotis.

based on the scavenging rate we have seen in the control section of this research, i'd estimate the kills are up over 4,000 per year at this site. And there are probably a hundred thousand less bats this year than last year, if not more, due to white nose syndrome.

so that's what i'm doing now. and applying to grad schools. hope you're all well...and that i get cable so I can watch the games this season.