@greenpeace

AND…all of those stories about how the turbines kill birds is just oil-industry propaganda.

Source:
https://www.statista.com/chart/15195/wind-turbines-are-not-killing-fields-for-birds/

#Data #Facts #Green #Environment #WindTurbines #Birds

@markwyner @greenpeace The graphic mentions sources, but then the actual article does not have any list of sources. Disappointing. It is not simple to fact-check this. But I was interested in the cat number.

The linked article says "Estimates places the number of U.S. bird deaths at the paws of cats at between 365 millions and 2.4 billion." It doesn't give sources for this. It does contain a link to the page https://www.fws.gov/library/collections/threats-birds that lists various threats to birds. It has a table with various things that kills birds, and for cats it gives much higher numbers than the graphic. It gives the source for that as "Loss et al 2013a", but has again no list of sources.

If I do a bit of web searching I find this, which apparently is the source: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380

And yes, the number is huge. Even larger that in the graphic, even. "We estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3–4.0 billion birds and 6.3–22.3 billion mammals annually."

I have no way to know how good and reliable the scientific methods used by Loss et al were. Some people seem to be suggesting they used very unreliable extrapolation from extreme cases. I found this paper, but it is on a cat-lover site, so can hardly be seen as neutral... https://www.alleycat.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/LossEtAl_Report_GregoryJMatthews_6-10.pdf

One obvious thing is that possibly cats to a large extent kill birds that would have died soon anyway.

In general I don't find it unbelievable that domestic and feral cats kill huge numbers of birds. The order of magnitude mentioned in the graphic might be way off from reality, though. (But still, it would be much larger than the number for wind turbines.)