Tag: wildlife

Wyoming: A thorough assessment of the threat wind turbines pose to eagles needs to be done

A programmatic Environmental Impact Assessment (“EIA”) is a comprehensive analysis of the cumulative impacts of the massive wind development underway in Wyoming. The growing adverse impact on golden eagles and other wildlife is especially disturbing. What can be done to limit the damage is a big part of the assessment.

There is National Environmental Policy Act (“NEPA”) language for this. It is called a “Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS)” looking at “cumulative effects.” The Feds completed two back in 2024. The first one was for multiple offshore wind projects in the New York Bight. They then completed one for the five proposed floating wind projects off California. These are good precedents for Wyoming.

Of course, both these offshore wind studies were Biden-era greenwash jobs that mostly ignored the obvious adverse impact on protected whales and other marine mammals. This does not mean that a good PEIS cannot be done for Wyoming.

A good start on the PEIS issues can be found in the numerous comments already filed in opposition to individual Wyoming wind projects. For example, the Two Rivers Project received over a hundred pages of detailed technical comments, many regarding the extreme threat to golden eagles. Two Rivers is part of what is called the growing “wall of wind” in southeastern Wyoming.

The Two Rivers comments are HERE.

One of the best is “Comments on Environmental Assessment of the Two Rivers Wind Energy Project on behalf of National Audubon Society and the Wyoming Outdoor Council.” It is really a 17-page research report including lots of data and maps. See letter #16 of 18 [see below].

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Why Is a Democratic Governor Undermining a Conservative Conservation Success Story?

Controversy is again raging over the fate of the Salt River wild horses, protected under state law as a natural treasure, after the Arizona Department of Agriculture awarded a new management contract requiring the removal of more than half the herd — despite a state law that authorizes removals only for humane reasons related to the health and safety of individual horses.

It didn’t have to be this way. In 2016, Arizona Republicans did something Washington rarely manages to do. They solved a problem. 

When the U.S. Forest Service moved to round up and remove every one of the Salt River wild horses from the Tonto National Forest, Arizonans responded with overwhelming opposition that stunned federal officials. More than 300,000 petition signatures flooded in. Members of Congress from both parties objected, including Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake. Tonto National Forest spokeswoman Carrie Templin told reporters she had never seen anything like it: “We expected public outcry. I don’t think anybody comprehended the magnitude.”

The Republican-led Arizona Legislature acted. In 2016, lawmakers passed the Salt River Wild Horse Act by a 53-3 vote. It was signed into law by then-Gov. Doug Ducey, who counted it among his top accomplishments of the year. The law’s intent was unambiguous: to protect the herd from harassment, killing, and slaughter and limit removals to humane reasons only related to the safety or health of individual horses or public safety. Nothing in the bill authorized mass removals for population reduction. Then-State Senator Katie Hobbs was among those who voted for it.

What followed was a model of conservative governance. The Arizona Department of Agriculture, led by then director Mark Killian — a prominent Republican and former state senator,  partnered with the nonprofit Salt River Wild Horse Management Group. This unique public-private partnership evolved into a unique and highly successful humane management program to protect the cherished herd. 

Over the last seven years, the group implemented a fertility control program that has reduced annual births from more than 100 foals to just one or two. Over seven years, the herd declined from 450 horses to 274 — a 40% reduction — without removing a single horse except those injured or ailing animals in need of special care. 

This program is privately funded at no cost to taxpayers, volunteer-powered, and state-overseen. A shining example of conservative principles: Limited government,  local control, fiscal responsibility, and a private initiative solving a public problem.

And it’s working.  

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Insanity: Newsom’s California Blows OVER $100 MILLION on a ‘Butterfly and Cougar’ Bridge With No End in Sight – Project Director Blames Trump and the Weather

While waste and California go together like peanut butter and jelly, even this latest example will blow your mind.

City Journal’s Chris Rufo broke an explosive story on Wednesday, revealing how Gavin Newsom’s California somehow spent $114 million on the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing (WAWC) over the course of four years. The crossing features an overpass for animals atop ten lanes of the 101 Freeway in Agoura Hills.

The stated goal of the project was to reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions by providing safe passage to the animals. The species that were supposed to benefit included the endangered cougars in the area and the monarch butterflies.

During a ceremony announcing the project, Newsom boasted that the state would provide $54 million in funding to complete the crossing. It was supposed to cost $92 million in total, with the remaining funding from private philanthropists.

Officials projected the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing would open in 2025, but now it is over $20 million over budget with no finish in sight. And you can thank good old-fashioned political corruption for it, along with the person in charge of the project, a loony cougar-sweater-wearing ‘environmentalist’ named Beth Pratt, who serves on WAWC’s Partner Leadership Team.

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Insect Loss As an Early Warning of Systemic Biological Failure

n medicine, silence can be more alarming than noise. For example, a patient who abruptly stops voicing discomfort or a monitor that ceases activity may signal system failure rather than resolution. Ecology presents a similar scenario, and currently, the silence is deeply concerning.

Insects are disappearing across vast regions globally. This is not a modest decline or a simple geographic shift, but a rapid vanishing of beetles, butterflies, moths, flies, mosquitoes, bees, and entire functional groups. This phenomenon is not speculative or anecdotal; it is among the most consistently documented biological trends of the past 50 years and remains insufficiently addressed. For context, the total biomass of lost insects is comparable to the combined weight of all commercial aircraft worldwide, representing a profound ecological and economic loss.

For decades, insects were treated as background noise—annoyances at best, pests at worst. Their abundance was assumed, their resilience taken for granted. We designed agricultural systems, urban environments, chemical interventions, and technological solutions on the unspoken assumption that insects would always be there. They were too numerous to fail.

This assumption has proven incorrect.

The Data Are Not Subtle

One of the most widely cited early warnings came from a long-term German entomological study that tracked flying insect biomass across protected areas over nearly three decades. The result shocked even the investigators: a decline of more than 75% in total flying insect biomass between 1989 and 2016.¹ These were not industrial zones or pesticide-saturated fields. They were nature preserves. However, many regions like Africa and large parts of Asia still lack comprehensive, long-term insect monitoring, leaving significant gaps in our understanding of global insect declines.

Subsequent studies confirmed that this was not an anomaly. A global review published in Biological Conservation concluded that approximately 40% of insect species are threatened with extinction, with declines accelerating in recent decades.² Longitudinal data from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Puerto Rico, North America, and East Asia tell the same story with local variation but consistent direction.³-⁶

The loss is not limited to rare or specialized species. Common insects—the ones that once filled the air—are disappearing fastest. Entomologists now openly discuss “functional extinction,” a state in which species technically still exist but no longer play their ecological roles in meaningful numbers.⁷

The significance of this issue is often underestimated.

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Texas Air-Drops Live Virus-Containing Edible Rabies Vaccines Over Cities from Aircraft—’Leaving Persons at Risk for Vaccine Exposure and Vaccine Virus Infection’: CDC

The Texas Department of Health and Human Services (DHS) has begun its annual distribution of RABORAL V-RG®, an oral rabies vaccine (ORV) bait—dropping the live laboratory-made virus from airplanes over Texas, as well as distributing it by hand.

The $2 million annual project is funded by the State of Texas and the United States Department of Agriculture Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service/Wildlife Services.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has known for over a decade that the RABORAL edible vaccine leaves “persons at risk for vaccine exposure and vaccine virus infection.”

Yet the department still allows millions of live genetically modified virus baits to be dispersed over communities, forests, and waterways each year without public notice, informed consent, or comprehensive biosafety oversight—posing potential risks to human health, wildlife, and national biosecurity.

Americans are being involuntarily exposed to laboratory-engineered pathogens capable of infecting multiple species, with no transparent risk disclosure or opt-out mechanism.

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California to Keep Bird Broiling Solar Plant in Operation

I was in Las Vegas with my family the week before Christmas. On the drive back to California we passed a solar generation site called Ivanpah. If you haven’t seen this before it’s pretty striking in person. Instead of using photo-voltaic cells, the site has three towers surrounded by mirrors. The mirrors focus light and heat on the towers which use the concetrated heat to turn turbines.

The site was built with funds from several major companies including Google and a federal loan guarantee of $1.6 billion dollars. When this site opened in 2014, it was considered a step into the future of solar energy, but that quickly changed for several reasons. First, the site never produced as much power as was promised. Second, the cost of PV solar panels dropped dramatically to the point that rate-payers were paying a lot more for Ivanpah’s solar energy than they would be if the site were just full of regular solar panels. And thirdly, the site had some environmental problems including interfering with local tortoises and killing as many as 6,000 birds a year.

A macabre fireworks show unfolds each day along I-15 west of Las Vegas, as birds fly into concentrated beams of sunlight and are instantly incinerated, leaving wisps of white smoke against the blue desert sky.

Workers at the Ivanpah Solar Plant have a name for the spectacle: “Streamers.”

And the image-conscious owners of the 390-megawatt plant say they are trying everything they can think of to stop the slaughter.

Federal biologists say about 6,000 birds die from collisions or immolation annually while chasing flying insects around the facility’s three 40-story towers, which catch sunlight from five square miles of garage-door-size mirrors to drive the plant’s power-producing turbines.

For all of these reasons, both the Biden administration and the Trump administration agreed the state should shut down Ivanpah. Here’s a video Reason made about it last April.

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Wind Turbines Are Killing Bald Eagles—And China Is Cashing In

For more than a decade, Western governments promoted wind energy as a straightforward solution to complex energy and geopolitical problems. Wind power was marketed as clean, inexpensive, and strategically essential—capable of creating jobs, reducing emissions, and limiting reliance on foreign suppliers. 

That argument spread quickly through global climate conferences and corporate sustainability offices. What did not spread was an honest assessment of who profited from the transition or which environmental and strategic costs were ignored.

China captured more economic and geopolitical advantage from this transition than any other nation. Beijing did not simply participate in the renewable-energy sector; it built the manufacturing system that underpins it. 

Today, China controls more than 70% of the global wind-turbine supply chain and produces over 80% of the world’s rare-earth elements, which are essential for turbine generators. 

State subsidies, state-directed financing, and export mandates allowed Chinese firms to underprice Western competitors, effectively making the United States and Europe dependent on a Chinese industrial network for their own energy infrastructure.

This was not an unintended outcome. China expanded its coal fleet—adding roughly two new coal plants per week in recent years—to power factories producing “green” hardware for global export. 

While the United States retired more than 300 coal units since 2010, and Europe imposed strict emissions policies, China increased emissions to manufacture the very wind components Western nations relied on to lower theirs. The West reduced domestic production while China strengthened its industrial leverage.

Environmental impacts were similarly minimized. Wind turbines occupy large land areas and disrupt ecosystems, but the most visible consequence is bird mortality. According to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates, wind turbines kill between 500,000 and 700,000 birds annually in the United States alone. 

Independent ecological studies suggest the number may exceed 1 million when offshore installations are included. Raptors—especially eagles—are disproportionately affected. Federal data has documented incidents in which individual wind facilities kill dozens of golden eagles per year, losses that other industries would face major penalties for.

These impacts are structural, not accidental. Wind turbines are frequently built along ridgelines, prairie corridors, and coastal regions where airflow is strongest. Those same regions serve as primary migratory pathways. 

Developers, environmental review boards, and federal agencies acknowledge this overlap in planning documents, yet the information rarely reaches the public. What would be considered an unacceptable environmental cost for a fossil-fuel project is reframed as tolerable when produced by wind.

Wind’s operational limitations create further tradeoffs. Capacity factors—the percentage of time a turbine actually produces its rated power—hover between 32% and 35% in the United States. 

Because wind is intermittent, grid operators rely on natural gas or nuclear generation to stabilize supply. 

This backup requirement raises system-wide costs.

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Fallout From Chernobyl Might Be Creating A New Kind Of Dog

Dogs are humanity’s best friend, and this is partially because we’ve bred them to better suit our preferences and needs. The Alaskan Malamute and Komondor, for example, were intentionally bred to serve specific roles (pulling sleds across the Arctic and guarding sheep from predators, respectively, in these two cases). It’s not just breeding that can produce new types of dogs, though. The harrowing damage to the ecosystem left in the infamous Chernobyl disaster’s wake may be contributing, too.

The April 1986 calamity caused ecological damage so severe that it will continue to scar the land for generations to come. In fact, according to Time, the director of the Chernobyl plant, Ihor Gramotkin, has stated that it would be “at least 20,000 years” before the plant’s immediate area would be safe again. The dangers of radiation exposure are severe, and the further scientists are able to study animals that live in the wider area, the better they can understand those effects. The local dog population has been regularly exposed for some time, as they shelter in the dangerously radioactive Semikhody train station. The area is still extremely hazardous, and Russian military activity throughout the exclusion zone could have far-reaching effects.

A 2023 study published on ScienceAdvances titled “The dogs of Chernobyl: Demographic insights into populations inhabiting the nuclear exclusion zone” investigated the DNA of some of these dogs and found that “genome-wide profiles from Chernobyl, purebred and free-breeding dogs, worldwide reveal that the individuals from the power plant and Chernobyl City are genetically distinct.”

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Wyoming conservation group sues federal agency to obtain data on eagles killed by wind farms

AWyoming conservation group filed a federal lawsuit this month against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, arguing that the agency is illegally withholding records on bald and golden eagle deaths at three wind projects in southern Wyoming. 

Mike Lockhart, a biologist who worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service for over 30 years, told Just the News that the data the federal government is withholding could help assess the true impacts of wind energy in Wyoming on eagle mortality.

“We have no real idea of how many birds are being killed. There’s birds that I suspect are being killed that just disappear in the presence of the wind turbines. And I think the numbers are enormous compared to what we know right now,” Lockhart said. 

Blocked as “Privileged and confidential”

Earlier this year, the Albany County Conservancy, based in Laramie, Wyo., filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act, seeking records on the reported eagle deaths and injuries within two miles of Seven Mile Hill I/II, Ekola Flats, and Dunlap wind projects in southern Wyoming. 

The Interior Department responded by releasing 910 pages, while another 256 pages were redacted. The agency withheld the records under Exemption 4, which blocks the revelation of “trade secrets and commercial or financial information obtained from a person [that is] privileged or confidential.” 

The group filed an administrative appeal in May challenging the exemption and demanding the department release all the data it has related to the request. The ACC received no response to their appeal, and so they filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. 

File

ACC Complaint.pdf

Wind energy developers have been targeting the area of southeast Wyoming, which has some of the richest wind resources in the U.S. According to the ACC’s lawsuit, there will be 28 utility-scale wind farms operating across Wyoming by this summer, and some projects have over 500 turbines. 

“It’s not proprietary. It’s dead eagles,” conservationist says 

Anne Brande, executive director of the ACC, told Just the News that the ecological risks of so many projects make transparency in federal oversight all the more imperative. 

The law allows a certain number of eagles to be lost via a permitting system called the “eagle take.” Wind farm owners collect records on bird mortality as part of the eagle take permits the developers are required to have in order to disturb, injure and kill eagles.  This data is public information submitted to federal agencies as part of their permitting, Brande said, and there’s nothing in those records that could be legally withheld under Exemption 4. 

“It’s not proprietary. It’s dead eagles,” she said. 

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Putin scientists unveil ‘spy pigeons fitted with brain implants and cameras that can be controlled like drones’

A state-linked Moscow neurotechnology firm boasts its operators can steer flocks of the flying pests across the sky at will. 

Researchers have launched field tests of so-called ‘bird-biodrones’ known as PJN-1, ordinary pigeons surgically implanted with neural chips that allow technicians to direct their flight routes.

The birds can be steered remotely in real time, with operators able to upload flight commands by stimulating targeted regions of the brain.

The pigeon then ‘believes it wants to fly’ in the instructed direction, claim sources at Neiry, which has deep ties to the Kremlin’s hi-tech innovation machine.

Surgery is carried out in which electrodes are inserted into the brain with millimetre precision.

The birds wear tiny solar-powered backpacks containing onboard electronics, GPS tracking, and the receiver that transmits signals into the neural implant.

Chillingly, Neiry insists that ‘no training is required’, declaring that any animal becomes ‘remotely controllable after the operation’ – with pigeons capable of covering 310 miles a day, or more than 1,850 miles in a week.

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