The U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum, posted a memorandum back in August calling on the agency to ensure compliance with the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, “to ensure that our national bird is not sacrificed for unreliable wind facilities!” [some emphasis, links added]
This is a long-overdue threat to major wind projects that have been living a lie.
After all, it was the Los Angeles director of the Sierra Club who coined the term “Cuisinarts of the Air” to capture the bird-chopping nature of industrial blades to the most treasured/protected birds of prey.
Wind projects are known to kill eagles, and climate extremists in the Biden admin still greenlit scores of these projects.
@Interior is enforcing the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act to ensure that our national bird is not sacrificed for unreliable wind facilities! pic.twitter.com/MFh25QneKw— Secretary Doug Burgum (@SecretaryBurgum) August 4, 2025
The “avian mortality” problem has a long history. May the new initiative finally (!) get to the bottom of things.
Government Neglect
The Burgum/DOI memorandum is significant given the failure of the Fish and Wildlife Service to act on the documented killing of Golden and Bald Eagles by industrial wind.
The dodge of estimating electrocutions from power poles as a “mitigation” strategy in this area is unacceptable (see David Wojick’s analysis below).
North American Platform Against Windpower (NA-PAW) keenly awaits the new DOI priority. It is well known that the ability to “mitigate” eagle deaths includes a lack of suitable and rigorous testing, incomplete implementation, limited technology, ignored interacting factors, site-specific requirements, and a lack of collaboration.
Add: developer-led counting and methodology; use of fewer bird-occupied testing sites; natural flow of natural processes where scavenging replaces/negates counting; massive level of obfuscation, including reference points to cats, cars, and windows.
The actual number of kills is completely unknown. ABC (American Bird Conservancy) estimated some years ago (2021 article), 880 bats and 573,000 birds were dead.
Actual numbers, again years ago, referencing the Spanish Ornithological Society numbers, a valid coordinate to the USA, is between 13 and 31 million annually. Then add electrocution.
In a 2014 study, researchers estimated that 25.5 million birds are killed each year due to collisions with power lines, and another 5.6 million are killed by electrocution.
Therefore, power lines built exclusively to connect new wind facilities to the existing energy grid result in additional bird mortalities that should be factored into the total toll in birds associated with wind energy development.
David Wojick of CFACT (Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow) has penned several succinct assessments of the problem.
“Federal regulators concluded that the golden eagle population cannot survive increased kills from human activity,” he noted, “and also determined that wind turbines substantially increase eagle deaths.”
The feds then offered a solution only a bureaucrat could love: Don’t protect the eagles from turbine strikes, but “offset” their deaths by reducing electrocutions from power poles.
The government then underestimated the number of power poles that would need to be made “safe” by a factor of as much as 241 and failed to save any meaningful number of eagles. See the link for the full report. See here for the executive summary.
Time for Action
NA-PAW expresses the hope that Secretary Burgum’s request to FWS is diligently applied, that no new wind factory permits are allowed, and retroactive closures of non-compliant wind factories are administered post haste.
Non-compliant yardsticks must be rejected. After-the-fact counts of dead birds and bats (in this case, protected species, Golden and Bald Eagles) are not nearly enough.
The corollary idea that reducing related power pole deaths can in some way “mitigate” wind turbine deaths is not credible.
Read rest at MasterResource
