Just Post

My somehow-now-conservative mom lives in the midwest and will rant long and hard about how windmills make the soil under them "dirty" because they "leak oil from the blades" and "all the farmers know it's true"

I once considered this lady smart, smh

I am pretty sure all of those pale in comparison to environmental pollution and destruction of nature reserves.

Like these people even care about wildlife. They would rather pump oil and leak in to the ocean if it meant they get to still drive gas guzzling cars polluting the Earth

679,089 seems oddly specific for an estimate

So we shouldn't use cat-butter engines to generate electricity?

Now compare migratory birds vs nesting. The error bar on these numbers is massive.

Missing is the deaths due to coal and deforestation.

The low and high estimate for cats are so far apart they may as well just shrug.

"Other collision's" kinda takes blame away from what's happening, its glass windows. This from wiki: "a 2024 study on the survival rate of bird-building collision victims indicates that previous research was vastly underestimating the number of deaths caused by collisions, and in actuality well over 1 billion birds die from collisions in the United States every year."

Fun fact, there's a layer they can put in glass that makes it visible to birds but not us, but its more expensive, so it isn't used most places!

Oh god, another time I see that cat killing birds statistics.

1. Cats prefer to kill rodents and are more equipped to it. And the same study Loss et al estimates cat killing rodents to be 4 times more than birds.
2. Rodents (e.g. rats) eats bird eggs. Same researcher fails to calculate how much...
3. All studies (well, 1 study in Australia) that compared bird population with cats in rodent areas confirm that removal of cats hastened decrease of bird population 2 times.
4. Loss at all is a metastudy. Some of the data sources on cat predation and other collisions are 70-100 years old. Some are more recent, but overall data quality on bird death is local, from small sample, and estimated. My favourite was a study on 10 cats in 3 villages estimated over a whole damn country.
5. The graph seems to be missing all other non-collision sources of bird population death, e.g. rodents eating birds, pesticide related deaths, electrocutions form powerlines, etc. etc.

Fun fact: windmills have a speaker on then that emits a high pitched chirp. Humans cant hear it, and birds avoid it.

I misread as "Cars (domestic and feral)" and was very concerned about the idea of feral cars XD

Ask any groundskeeper for a glass building. You find dead birds every day.