Bats, bird kills, and turbines

Mon, 10/19/2009 - 10:59 - Sherri Lange

It's Saturday, and a touch of fall is in the air. Actually, more than a touch. Lake Ontario is calm. The bats will be gone south, some, and some, of course, will remain all winter, huddled together in the caves by the Scarborough Bluffs. We see them all summer, grazing at evenfall on the mosquitoes and other insects, caterpillars, some 600 insects per animal PER HOUR. That's quite an appetite. Imagine West Nile Disease without bats.

(By the way, these Bluffs are also historical and geological: the last remnants of a retreating ice flow, some 13,000 years ago. They are fragile and subject to wind and water erosion all the time. Often people's homes have gone over the hill! Imagine placing turbine disruption 1.5 or 2km from those homes.)

Bats are truly one of nature's most misunderstood creatures. Once the myths are dispelled, you will truly have a respect for these night flyers. Bats never attack people, for one. Bats are an indicator of a healthy environment.

Bats also populate the rainforests and migrating or not, they account for 95% of the seed and flora population of the forests. And there's only 7% left of that original rainforest. That is quite the service for mankind, if you want to see it that way.

Bat populations are in deep trouble. Due to loss of habitat, strange fungus growths that seem to spread through a colony, and hyper sensitivity to what, we don't even know, we are down, down in these populations, by over 50%.

Most experts agree, though that the white fungus (White Nose Syndrome) is not really the primary cause of the startlingly huge numbers of bat deaths in North America. More likely, they say, they are likely starving...why, we don't know. Have large insect populations been wiped out by pesticide use, so rampant in farming? In Dorset Vermont, several scientists examined a colony that had nested in the caves for 10,000 years. One hundred thousand bats have nested in this cave for a very long time. Suddenly, they are dying in huge numbers. And it's spreading. One reporter on CBS news said that losing so many bats is like pulling the main steel beam from a bridge: it's going to collapse.

I spoke with Bob in Calgary, Alberta, who runs a helicopter service. He is very familiar with bats and has studied them for years. His concern is the thousands of bats, or tens of thousands, that are being maimed, killed mostly, by the tips of the turbines, where the pressure is too great for the fragile, paper-thin lungs of the bats. (It's rather hard to get a true dead animal rate, as predators will naturally clean up and do not time their activities so that humans can count!) Curious and intelligent animals, they search out the turbines, possibly for food, possibly for nesting stations, we really don't know. Proponents of wind industrialization understand the significance of the bats disappearing from earth. They are always struggling to do studies, often enlisting Universities for that service, in order to abate these startling deaths.

Scarborough Bluffs has many species of bats: you daren't disturb them in winter, the nesting kinds, as even waking ONE up can disrupt the hyper sensitive metabolism and heat retention of the entire colony.

Scarborough Bluffs also is home to a fringe of Carolinian Forest, original, with 64 species of ferns, 70 varieties of trees, vulnerable and endangered species such as Oppossum, Queen Snake, Grey Fox, the Soft Shelled Turtle, to name a few. Acadian Flycatchers are migrating birds that summer in Ontario and winter in Central and South America. These areas are under intense pressure from urbanization. If you look in your birds of Canada book, habitat loss and pesticides are the number two reasons for decline.

There are over 400 different species of birds recorded in the Carolinian Forest that is right off the Scarborough Bluffs, and many if not most of these are only seen in 50% of other woodland areas of Canada. The Carolinian Forest is only 1% now of Canada's forest cover. Worth preserving? You bet.

Michigan has said that for National Parks, such as this area most surely should be, the turbine setback should be 13 miles. Not bad. Ontario proposes setbacks of 1km to 2km, depending on who you speak with at which time. There's a natural shelf there that makes construction much less costly. Good for Michigan! I wish all the setbacks were 13 miles, off the entire shoreline. Actually I'd prefer zero turbines in our fresh water. Zero.

We had a Hydro official tell us at a community meeting that only one bird was killed during a start up environmental study for the CNE (Canadian National Exhibition) turbine. Only one. Apparently the director of that study (picking up the phone does wonders!) was instructed to abort the bird kill numbers study just when migration began. Ouch.

It does appear more and more to me that it will be communities like yours and mine, people getting themselves up to speed on ecological issues and passing that information around that can possibly save 20% of the world's fresh water. Two billion people on the planet are starved for fresh water, actually dying as a result. Of course, it will also take political action, and there's no doubt that communities can shape things to come.

Thanks from Toronto!

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