TV Tower Wires Kill 400 Birds in One Night

[G_j]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-5325408,00.html

TV Tower Wires Kill 400 Birds in One Night

Thursday October 6, 2005 1:16 PM

MADISON, Wis. (AP) - As many as 400 songbirds were killed in one night after they flew into wires holding up a television tower.

The deaths may spur the creation of a group to study the dangers communication towers pose to migrating birds, said specialists with the Department of Natural Resources.

``It's an issue that has been with us for decades,'' DNR avian ecologist Sumner Matteson said. ``But we really haven't done anything about it.''

The birds were killed the night of Sept. 13-14 at the WMTV tower.

``There were birds all over the place,'' said Steven Ugoretz, a DNR environmental specialist who works on tower-related issues.

..more..

[meganmonkey]

1. Poor birdies

:(

[leftchick]

2. There have been reports about this for years...

how many reports do they need before they actually address the issue?

:(

[lakeguy]

3. i'm guessing 400?

and by that point all the money available for the problem will be spent.}(

[sybylla]

25. In this case, the Madison community is addressing this now

From yesterday's Wisconsin State Journal article on the same story:
http://www.madison.com/wsj/home/local/index.php?ntid=56563&ntpid=1
Emphasis is mine

<snip>
...Officials with WMTV were not available Tuesday for comment. Ugoretz said the WMTV tower is of special concern because of its 1,100-foot height. Nighttime neotropical migrants usually fly at altitudes of 1,000 to 2,000 feet. Other towers in the Madison area, he added, don't seem to cause as many kills, although collection of such data is spotty when it exists.

Matteson and Ugoretz said they hope to convene a task force, made up of bird experts and representatives from the communications industry, to study the issue and find ways to modify the towers so that birds avoid them. Possible solutions, Matteson said, include using phosphorescent lights to illuminate guy wires and changing the blinking frequency of red warning lights, which are required by the Federal Aviation Administration on towers taller than 200 feet.

The problem is difficult to address both because of the lack of record-keeping on such kills and because the migration of birds - what triggers it and how the birds find their way - remains shrouded in mystery. There are nights in the spring and the fall when the skies are filled with tens of thousands of migrating birds, but there is much scientists don't know about their behavior.

John Idzikowski, a Milwaukee ornithologist who uses radar to study bird migrations, has radar images that capture immense clouds of birds migrating at night. "It looks like a storm on the radar," he said.
Though there is considerable uncertainty about exactly what happens, scientists believe migrating birds lose sight of navigational stars in the glare of cities and zero in on the bright lights on some tall towers. Often tower kills happen on nights when bad weather forces migrating flocks closer to the ground. Circling the lights on the towers in large flocks, the birds are felled by the guy wires, invisible to them in the dark.
<snip>

You know what they say when you assume.... ;)

[-..__...]

4. Lights?

From the article...

"Matteson and Ugoretz said they want to form a task force of bird experts and communications industry representatives to study the issue. Possible solutions include using lights to illuminate wires and changing the blinking frequency of red warning lights, Matteson said".

I understand that because of the danger the towers might present to low flying aircraft, that some sort of illimination is needed.

But their solution seems to be the opposite response to a similar situation in NYC.

"Skyscrapers dim lights to save birds"

"NEW YORK (Reuters) - The city that never sleeps will darken the lights of the famed Manhattan skyline after midnight to help save migrating birds.

New York civic leaders on Tuesday said the lights of buildings above the 40th floor will be turned off after midnight in the fall and spring migration seasons to save birds.

Since 1997, more than 4,000 migratory birds have been killed or injured from colliding into skyscrapers, bird experts said.

"New York City is this nexus of ancient migratory flyways, and the parks have become these havens for these birds, but ... the buildings with their light draw birds to them, sort of like moths to a flame," NYC Audubon Director E.J. McAdams said at a news conference".

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20050921/od_nm/environment_birds_dc

[sybylla]

27. Article misstates - their solutions really are along the same lines as NYC

See post 25 for a better article on the issue. This is a highly regulated tv tower, not a skyscraper.

They are considering making the guy wires phosphorescent - that's different than using lights. And they will experiment with the lights required by the FAA to see if they can find a strobing frequency that won't attract the birds.

Seem like plausible ideas to me. :shrug:

[Verve]

5. Is this what Bush's speech is about?!

We devised a way to keep bird flu out of our country, we will kill all the Birds in the U.S. as a precaution!

(Obviously, I'm using sarcasm, yet with his conservation record, you never know!)

[benburch]

6. I just can't see what you could do to fix this.

Can you?

[G_j]

11. not really

but I know close to nothing about this (outside what I read in this article).
I do believe in searching for solutions and that there must be ways to at least improve the situation. Often where there is a will there is a way. Sadly birds are under a lot of stress in general due to global warming, habitat loss etc.
Canary in a coal mine comes to mind.

[leftchick]

7. towerkill.com...

To answer such questions, Manville had hoped the government and industry would pony up a pot of money for studies. For example, ornithologist Bill Evans--an independent researcher from Mecklenburg, New York, who has helped publicize the tower-kill issue through a web site, towerkill.com--has proposed a $50,000 study that would equip a TV tower with a variety of lights, then use acoustic-monitoring gear to document how birds react to different colors and flash rates. Other researchers have outlined a multiyear, $15 million to $20 million, national survey to nail down the size of the problem. But research funds remain scarce, in large part because neither the Bush administration nor the fast-moving communications industry consider the studies a priority.

http://magazine.audubon.org/features0109/faulty_towers.html

http://www.towerkill.com/

interesting clickable map there...

[don954]

8. sorry, but its BS. I have worked with communications towers for

Years, it’s very rare that we find any dead birds around. I have been on tower sites for weeks on end and have never witnessed a collision. If towers were killing 400 birds a night, I would have noticed it, no doubt..

[leftchick]

10. I guess Audubon Magazine is making this up then right?

It is remarkable that the 59-year-old curator at the Museum of Science in Buffalo, New York, can still remember such detail. After all, in the past 35 years he has spent nearly a thousand mornings documenting bird kills at a trio of TV towers perched on rural ridges 25 miles southeast of Buffalo. Following large kills, Clark would search, stooped over, under the towers for hours, a grim reaper straining to spot and collect as many as 1,000 carcasses. "A sore back is a hazard in this business," he murmured as we walked through the ankle-high grass, which obscured anything smaller than a softball.

http://magazine.audubon.org/features0109/faulty_towers.html

along with the photos of thousands of dead birds documented that I saw in the print addition. :eyes:

[don954]

14. its a very, very rare phenomenon, in 15 years i have never seen

a site with such an event, and i have been to thousands of sites all over the USA. im sure pesticides and air pollution cause many, many more bird causalities than all the towers in the nation. If there are some towers that have such kills, its prob located in a bad spot (along a migration route) & should be evaluated, but again, ive been to at least 1700 towers, and never have I witnessed such a thing.

[G_j]

13. thanks

this adds greatly to the subject at hand. :thumbsup:

[leftchick]

23. you should see the print addition with photos

it is very sad. :(

[Vinnie From Indy]

9. I suspect fowl play!

[Verve]

20. LOL! n/t

[txaslftist]

12. Survival of the fittest.

I heard a report a few months back to the effect that windmills (the kind that generate electricity) were killing thousands of bats in Georgia. Some bats, however, seemed to avoid the windmills. Those are the ones that will survive and reproduce, and eventually all bats will avoid windmills.

Same with the birds. Sorry, fellas, but you weren't born with the right equipment so you don't get to reproduce. The smart birds will eventually be the only ones left.

[shraby]

15. Why don't they just hang a bunch of fake owls around

the towers? Birds are afraid of owls. Hawks would probably work too.

[don954]

16. we do, but to scare snakes most of the time

heres some picts yall might like:
http://www.tower-pro.net/Pictures_of_interest/hawk/July%2016,2004%20064.jpg
http://www.tower-pro.net/Pictures_of_interest/hawk/July%2016,2004%20073.jpg
http://www.tower-pro.net/Pictures_of_interest/hawk/July%2016,2004%20066.jpg

[Jose Diablo]

17. We tried this

In Pontiac, Mi, the radio horns are inside a open tower and pigeons roosted inside this tower.

Over many years, the pigeon droppings filled the insides of the tower. It took 5 dump truck loads to empty the towers. Good fertilizer I might add.

After cleaning out the inside of the tower, the long distance operators that worked in the building the tower stood on noticed the pigeons were now perching on the edge of the structure, and they objected to the pigeon droppings hitting the tops of their heads.

So we took some stuffed owls and perched them inside the tower. No help. The pigeons learned to ignore the stuffed owls.

We finally built a covered walkway for the operators for a very large amount of money. Can't have our dainty operators with pigeon droppings in their hair you know.

Anyway, I imagine if live owls could have been persuaded to roost in the tower it would have worked, but stuffed owls didn't work.

[don954]

19. nasty! would have hated to ahve that site...

and I thought conduit full of critters were nasty..

[Jose Diablo]

21. As in all things, there are good points and bad

Although the pigeons were the down side, the up side was the presence of all those operators. Makes for interesting diversions after work.

Thats why we worked so hard to please them. Whatever they wanted, we gave them. I guess thats probably universal among men.

I loved working in the Pontiac building.

[buzzsaw_23]

18. An estimate 10-40 million/year

perish ramming into microwave towers. This so we can have our techno-gadgets. Very sad.

[sybylla]

28. US Fish and Wildlife service numbers are much lower

though still quite sad at 5 million.

[ucmike]

30. "techno gadgets" minimizes their use

a lot of those towers carry your regular phone signals over mountain ranges, deserts, and long distances, and bring service to areas that might not have them otherwise.

[Junkdrawer]

22. I smell another attack on Wind Turbines coming...

Can't have anything challenge the oil-based economy and the current political leadership who derive their power thus.

[Jose Diablo]

24. You got that right

There are few places with category 4/5 wind as it is, and out of the woodwork pops opponents to efforts to place wind turbines in the spots that make wind generation cost effective.

Domestic house cats kill at least 10 times as many birds in a given year than wind turbines. Not only that, but birds are very prolific at reproduction. You can bet, the birds will be here long after we are gone.

There are many environmental things that are truly bad. There are things that mean the end of us all. Yet when groups focus on the things that are inconsequential, this takes away the power from those groups that can make a difference in this world.

I view the bird kill anti-wind turbine enviromental group as one of those groups that has a cause that's inconsequential. In this case, I say screw the birds.

[arwalden]

26. Thanks For Pointing That Out.

<< Domestic house cats kill at least 10 times as many birds in a given year than wind turbines. Not only that, but birds are very prolific at reproduction. You can bet, the birds will be here long after we are gone. >>

That's something you never hear from wind-turbine opponents or PETA or any of the other KOOKS.

[Jose Diablo]

29. I don't know if I would call them kooks

I think misguided, but well intentioned, is a better way to think of some of the 'causes' that people get behind.

As for cats, I like them, but I do see them for what they are. Predators of the highest caliber. When a domestic cat is inside the home, personality wise they are kittens. But turn them out into the 'jungle' and you see them for what they really are, predators. We shouldn't think of cats as little humans, they are cats. No more, no less. They have a place in this world, just as we do. Their place is to kill and eat other animals, like birds.

I think it is a reluctance of many people to see the world as it is, they want the world to be something out of a Disney film. It just isn't that way though. Nor are cats what many want them to be, they are just cats, but that is not so bad either when you really see them as they are. Fine mothers/fathers and superb killers for food.

We really should go full blast in developing wind turbine electricity generation. WE need the power too. WE also have a right to live.

[ucmike]

31. i wonder if the tower isn't the problem

i wonder if sometimes birds are affected by the signals coming from the tower. the cables on those towers aren't more than a few inches across, i can't understand how so many birds could fly into the cabling and be killed.

i can tell you that the towers are quite comfortable for some birds. i have seen the left over lunch of many hawks and falcons on antennas and tower structure. my former boss found part of a cat on top of an antenna about 300' up.