Ummm. No. Just google ‘windmill bird deaths’ and you will get many pro and con stories. Just a brief reading gives 10,000 to 40,000 bird deaths per year in the U.S. alone. Turbines exist in other countries as well. One facility in Wolfe Island off the shores of Kingston, Ont., Canada, has 86 turbines. Each wind turbine averages 14 bird kills per year and 29 bat kills. That amounts to 1032 birds killed per year and 2540 bats killed.
Millions of birds die each year by unnatural causes, so the number of 40,000 in the U.S. pales by comparison. I don’t know what the deaths worldwide are. But just because the national number is much lower does not mean that it is non-existent or unimportant.
Perhaps 400,000 is a worldwide number?
I apologize if I seemed to be saying that bird deaths due to wind machines are "non-existent or unimportant". As one who, during my time as a wildlife rehabilitator, hand-raised a score or more injured/orphaned birds for weeks or months each until they are ready to be released, I know that every single one of those lives are God-given and precious.
Wind power at small scales has been around for centuries, and any American farmer will tell you that prior to FDR's Big-Government New Deal REA, a lot of America's rural heartland relied on wind power. I personally think that while modern small-scale wind power is both practical and worthwhile, the large-scale projects tend to be troublesome boondoggles.
Anyway, my point before was that bird kills are not a good means for advocating against large-scale wind power.
The number of birds actually killed by wind machines is a) mostly unknown, due to lack of data, and b) a lot smaller than the figures usually fabricated by the anti-wind-power advocates. In that information vacuum, people with agendas make data up. I have seen figures taken from a small study done on some turbines that were (unfortunately) sited directly on a major migration path, and multiplied by the estimated number of turbines in the world, as if they all were in such paths. That's silly at best, and a better description is "fraudulent".
> Perhaps 400,000 is a worldwide number?
It could be. As above, I don't know the real numbers any better than those who fabricate them; I believe it's lower than often cited, because no one is able to show the carcasses, and if birds were being knocked out of the sky at the cited rates, there would be piles of them on every wind farm.
Your mention of bat kills is interesting. I personally like bats a lot, and hadn't thought wind machines posed a significant danger to them, given that they are known to be able to fly through rotating electric fan blades and so on. I'll look into that, and thank you for the thought.