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.

thanks pat! when you first told me about this, i assumed it was cause of direct hits.

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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.

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That's a really simple solution thats very effective. I'm really surprised that it cuts down kills by THAT much though.

High winds=less kills makes sense; it's difficult to run into a headwind, I can't imagine trying to fly into one.

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Pretty interesting... I thought of you today when a bat flew into the restaurant that I work at today. That was fun...

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"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hockey Night in Buffalo

if things were going extinct naturally, like pandas and polar bears, i'd be less worried about it. when humans are the reason things are going extinct, because people are too fucking stupid to test things completely, it's not arrogant, it's trying to cover our asses.

But from what? I mean, say you obliterate an entire species of predator. That predator's place in the food chain will 1) be replaced by something that wasn't able to battle out the original placeholder or 2) 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.

I'm playing devil's advocate here, I'm with and support you 100%. It's nature. I agree that doing what we can for things like the bats and windmills is great.

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.

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you just described whitetailed deer. we can continue paying hundreds of millions of dollars a year in damages or suck it up and reintroduce nature.

the problem with bats is they are very unique. there is no animal that can fill that niche...for millions of years. they really don't have any predators and they are out at night. no other land animal uses sonar.

Lessons of Spirituality.

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Wheelhouse

pandas are actually on the rise in the wild.

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

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Me too, it's just frustrating as (the lack of) fuck.

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apparently, female pandas have a LOW low birth rate and a very short cycle that they can conceive. add that to their low numbers... its a crapshoot at best.

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Fuck REAL Pandas.....Red Pandas are where its at! Tell me this isn't the cutest goddamn thing you ever saw....

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"I can't really hear what Jeremy says, because I got my two Stanley Cup Rings plugging my ears...." -Patrick Roy in reference to Jeremy Roenick's trash talking

Fag.



lol, you're right. that's a cute lil fucker.

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Yea, that red panda is fucking adorable.

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mechaphil

Probably tasty, too.








Just kidding. (Mostly)

Ham

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Do you believe yet?

Very good research Pat. One of the wind farms in Texas I was working on had its permits pulled specifically due to this problem. There was a bat colony 6 miles away and they were finding dead bats and not due to direct strikes, but due to the pressure change behind the blades. They stopped construction, only got to 40MW and decided to relocate. Clipper Turbines were used on that one.

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Lord Stanley's Cup is what its all about.
Mr. Pegula, your destiny awaits you sir.