IF you want to make a real change in the deaths of MILLIONS of birds urge governments and businesses of tower blocks to turn off their lights at night and make communication towers safer. http://tinyurl.com/cn5yto
It seems to me this thread is a red herring designed to move blame from photographers by disparaging others and is not needed.
I went to this report.
http://www.abcbirds.org/newsandreports/towerkillweb.pdf
To me it is a very incomplete piece of research. It documents 545,250 dead birds listed as killed by towers. That covers 230 species. But what the report fails to document is how many total days in the survey. The data were collected over 50 years! Nor are there any documented reports of bird deaths in areas not near a tower. How do we know those were all due to tower deaths without a comparison to non-tower areas? Birds die everywhere.
I have found 4 dead birds in my yard in 13 years at my current house. I could conclude they were due to collisions with my house. I know of one collision with the house, but the bird flew away. Three of the bird deaths occurred in the year West Nile virus hit Colorado, and the 4th was the year after.
The point is one can use data for multiple purposes, and unless careful controls are on the study, one can't actually prove a single given cause. So given those caveats, the study above reported 525,250 dead birds over some 50 years at some X number of towers. X is not given although 47 sites were given some of which have 32 towers. Assuming 1000 towers, that works out to about 10.5 birds per tower per year assuming all the birds were killed by towers.
And if the bird population in the US is ~5 billion, over 50 years, its a pretty small mortality rate.
But if you look at the whole picture where there are probably many 100,000's of towers in the USA then 10.5 birds per year starts to become a fairly large number. But I whole heartily agree that the numbers they give are basically useless.Originally Posted by rnclark
One place where I am very sure that tagging has been very useful is with the California Condor program.
Bill
This is so much fun :D
Let's assume 1,000,000 towers and 10,000,000 birds are killed by the towers every year.
Hmmmm
5 billion birds create how many new birds each year reduced by 10 million birds that die as a result of the 1 million towers that benefit Man?
Seems like a good trade to me - 1,000,000 towers for Man; 10 million out of "X" billion birds born each year scarified for the benefit of Man.
I don't have a problem with those numbers assuming the correctness of the assumptions for the purpose of this discussion.
Large with out context is meaningless.
1 death is huge when the population is 10, but one clearly isn't a large number.
Lets not even make up numbers though, lets assume that the article did sufficient research on easily countable things like comm towers and go from there.
The tower kills article claims there were over 77,000 (lets round that up to 78K) comm. towers as of 2000. assuming the 5K new towers built per year number they give is accurate, that would mean there is about 118K towers now. At Rodger's estimated 10.5 kills/tower/year that's 1.2M kills per year. Assuming the population number of 5B that Rodger gives is accurate, then tower strikes account for 0.025%, that's one quarter of one tenth of one percent,of the population. Either way unless there are specific cases where certain populations are impacted disproportionately, I don't see the problem at all.
Talking about fallacies though, the paper is the biggest red herring in this thread.
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