Pay To Play
By Mitch Berg
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
An individual who kills an eagle can be fined $100,000 and sentenced to a year in jail. An organization, $200,000. Penalties increase for subsequent offenses.
But a windmill energy company will be paying less than $30,000 each for dead eagles, with no jail at all.
Quite a deal: a bulk discount on dead birds and immunity from imprisonment. I guess that’s the price Mother Nature pays for saving the planet from global warming.
Joe Doakes
I’m imagining people working on wind farms playing games with “perverse incentives”, trying to maneuver the windmills to knock off eagles on the cheap.
I’m weird like that.
April 27th, 2022 at 6:23 am
I’ve helped pick up dead birds on one of those windmill farms in western Minnesota. That day, we picked up over 100 birds of many species. No eagles, but seven owls, 12 hawks of four varieties, a lot of pigeons, blackbirds, sparrows, robins and a variety of waterfowl. They get devastated during the annual migrations.
April 27th, 2022 at 8:37 am
windmills = free food for coyotes and other carrion feeders
Its a safe bet that the dead eagle count should be much higher than reported but the coyote/fox/wolf/wild boar/opossum cleanup crew that shows up every night gobbles up the evidence. As an added bonus living near a wind farm means there are lots of flies during warm weather.
April 27th, 2022 at 8:56 am
Pig
Good points. The crew that I was working on, was told to spread out to about 100 yards or so around the windmills to find any that didn’t drop immediately.
April 28th, 2022 at 12:25 pm
Two americas, JD, two americas… I guess we still have the nobles and peeons with different rules for each. Did we even have a revolution?