[TowerTalk] birds and towers, and other critters

[Jim Lux]

The towerkill web site makes the point that tall lighted towers (which are
the ones at issue here, by the way) are not the only, or even the major,
source of bird kills. They point out (as did a poster a couple of days ago)
that most towers are regulated by the same entity, and you've got to start
somewhere, so you might as well start somewhere easy.

They also point out that bird kills don't correlate well with corpses at the
base because of scavenging carnivores.  The recent studies actually use
radar to detect the falling bird corpses.

I think the take home message for hams is that this bears watching, and to
make sure that the "lighted towers over 200 feet" doesn't get generalized
into all towers.  Even more important is to make sure that this issue
doesn't get coopted by the "no towers, no where" folks.  You want to be
rational and keep pointing back to the documented evidence when rule making
gets started.

A gentle reminder to the *editor* (as well as the writer) of the media
publishing an unwarranted extrapolation regarding the importance of
"fact-checking" allegations might also be in order. A one-time 10,000 one
night bird kill (which is well documented) does not say much about how many
kills/year, but is probably newsworthy in its own right (in the same sense
as mass groundings of whales).  The media's responsibility is to poke holes
in someone who takes that 10,000 number, multiplies it by 365 and multiplies
it by 2000 to get "billions of birds per year".

But, get YOUR ducks in a row before sending such a reminder.

Jim, W6RMK