Image courtesy of Michael Durham/Nature Picture Library/Alamy.
Joel
Kontinen
Wind
turbines kill bats at an alarming rate. Nearly 19 million bats are estimated to
have been killed by wind turbines in the US between 1981 and 2024, but measures
can be taken to make them less deadly.
Bats play a
vital role in ecosystems, particularly by controlling insects like mosquitoes
and moths that produce crop-killing caterpillars.
“We know
bats are being impacted, but could we change the engineering or sites of a
turbine to minimise those impacts?” she asks. “There’s been an increasing
interest in this, but we just haven’t had the appropriate data yet.”
Now, Straw,
Labuzzetta and their colleagues have analysed 499 reports from wind farms
across the 48 adjoining US states to estimate how many bats were killed by
turbines from 1981 to 2024, focusing on 10 species. They used a statistical
model that considered differences in how wind farms searched for dead bats, the
size and design of their turbines, and the surrounding environment.
Their
results suggest that wind turbines killed an estimated 18.7 million bats
between 1981 and 2024. Annual deaths seem to have exceeded 1.5 million from
2021 onwards, which may be the result of more wind turbines being installed.
The
researchers aren’t sure why bats fly so close to wind turbines.
Source:
Christa Lesté-Lasserre. 2026 Wind turbines have killed 19 million bats in 40 years in the US | New Scientist 26 October
Posts
