In 2016, a first study of its kind found that hundreds of solar farms in the US could kill nearly 140,000 birds annually. The researchers expected that this number will triple when all currently planned solar parks go online. Also, it’s hard to say how accurate or complete these numbers are.
Most of the monitoring of solar farms is currently done by people hired by the project owners, and there are no consistent guidelines for searching solar farms for dead birds. It is difficult to estimate the total number of deaths from the actual birds found, in part because scavengers sometimes get away with bird carcasses.
These factors could mean the numbers reported are low estimates. However, some solar proponents say the industry is being wrongly attacked. They refer to the number of bird deaths for other reasons. For example, a 2013 study found that cats kill between 1.4 billion and 3.7 billion birds each year in the United States.
However, Yuki Hamada, a biophysical scientist at the Argonne, says: “These bird problems in solar parks are a major concern and also something that the renewable energy industry is keen to understand and mitigate.”
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