Ongoing studies of birds, marine mammals and sea turtles off the Jersey Shore have found an abundance of life in an area where hundreds of wind turbines could be spinning by 2020, participants in a public meeting said today. ..."We're trying to figure out where are the areas of sensitive habitat, if you will, areas that perhaps we should think twice about or avoid before we build something," he said. "The objective here is to try and steer these facilities to areas where impacts will be reduced."

Three environmental groups said Wednesday afternoon that they have obtained federal government records that show that the proposed site of the Shaffer Mountain Wind Project outside Ogletown is indisputably occupied habitat of the endangered Indiana bat, and that habitat used by the species already has been illegally destroyed.

A way to reduce the high number of deaths of migratory bats at wind turbine sites may lie in a groundbreaking study at Iberdrola Renewables' Casselman Wind Power Project in Somerset County. During the study, conducted at the 23-turbine project from late July to early October, selected wind turbines were stopped during low wind conditions to determine whether shutting down the big blades during low power production periods would reduce bat deaths while having a minimal impact on power generation. ..."The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is concerned that several species of bats, including potentially endangered bats, are killed each year by wind turbines," said Alex Hoar, the service's northeast coordinator for review of wind power projects.

In a first-of-its-kind study, the owners of a Somerset County wind farm and an independent conservation group are joining forces to study the effects of turbines on bats. Bat Conservation International is conducting a controlled experiment in which select turbines at Iberdrola Renewables' Casselman Wind Power Project were shut down during certain wind conditions from July through earlier this month. It is the first study in the country to look at the impact of temporarily stopping the turbines on reducing bat deaths.

A Northumberland County firm has backed off a plan to build wind turbines on South Mountain in eastern Lebanon County. ...But birds and bats got in the way of the plans, said Justin R. Dunkelberger, chief executive for Penn Wind. He explained that the South Mountain site is part of a bird-migration path and is also frequented by bats. "As a wind developer, we have to be concerned with birds and bats," Dunkelberger said. "We want to be responsible developers."

Bats and wind turbines make a bad mix. In fact, bats have become an unexpected casualty in the burgeoning wind-power industry, with several thousand bats killed by turbines each year in North America. Now studies are being conducted at the future site of a Peace region wind farm in order to save bats from dropping dead near the whirling blades. ...Most of the wind-farm research has been focused on birds, and little is known about the effect on bats, although new studies are beginning to yield clues on how to minimize the impact of the wind farms on the tiny flying animals.

Bats may never find wind farms as friendly as belfries, but a three-month study in northeast British Columbia is designed to make the power-generating turbines at least somewhat less deadly. Monitoring devices installed by AltaGas at the site of the proposed Bear Mountain Wind Farm have been recording data on the population and migratory routes of bats in the area since July. In later stages of development, the research is intended to help how the company can make its turbines to more bat-friendly.

Windfarms are blamed for the deaths of large numbers of birds, including the threatened hen harrier, that crash into the spinning blades. But, what's now emerging is that bats are probably more at risk than birds. Up to now little has been known about the effects of windfarms on bats. Something that has mystified researchers, however, is that bats found dead around turbines had no visible injuries. So, are windfarms killing bats without touching them? It seems they are. ..."If bat fatalities continue this has the potential to be really serious. The problem is likely to get much worse with the proliferation of turbines, not just from large power companies erecting them but private individuals doing so as well," Ms Baerwald pointed out.

While the open sky is big enough for 400-foot-high wind turbines and migratory birds, animal conservationists are airing their concerns about the threat windmills pose to wildlife. "Any place thinking about installation (of wind turbines) should take years studying the issue," Keith Bildstein, director of conservation science at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, said Friday. "That is a prescription the wind industry apparently finds distasteful." Bildstein and other local conservationists and bird-watchers say the wind industry fails to adequately study bird migration patterns before wind projects break ground.

Over the last two years, researchers studied hundreds of bat carcasses found under wind turbines and dissected them to determine the cause of death. Supervised by U of C biology professor Robert Barclay, the researchers determined the majority of bats killed suffered from barotrauma­-- physical damage caused by a difference in pressure inside and outside the body. Barotraumas affect respiratory systems when air pressure suddenly drops, causing the lungs to over-expand. Only 10 per cent of bat deaths come from collisions with wind turbines.

German animal campaigners are alarmed by the number of dead bats being found near wind turbines and have called for restrictions on generators in areas with high populations of the nocturnal mammal. "The bats are not only being clobbered to death by the turbines, but can also suffer from collapsed lungs due to the drastic change in air pressure," said Hermann Hoetker of the Michael Otto Institute for wildlife and the environment.

Baerwald, whose team checks for carcasses under turbines at the Summerview wind farm near Pincher Creek, Alta., every morning, says bats are one of the unforeseen casualties in the rush to harness wind power. Several thousand of the tiny flying mammals are killed by the turbines each year across North America, with some farms much more deadly than others. Industry officials say they are determined to reduce the death toll but concede it is not going to be easy since so little is known about the nocturnal creatures. ...The researchers dissected 75 corpses and report that 90 per cent died form internal hemorrhaging consistent with "barotrauma," tissue damage caused by rapid or excessive change in air pressure near the rotor blades.

In the future, bat conservationists suggest, wind farms should be built away from known bat migration flight paths. The problem is: bat migrations are poorly understood at best. "We don't even know if they use migratory routes," Baerwald says, though she plans to begin looking for them in September. "We don't have a clear idea of what a bad site for wind turbines is in terms of bat fatalities," Cryan adds. "We're not to the point yet where we can suggest solutions." The full impact of these bat-killing pressure zones extends far beyond the wind farm, however. Such migrating bats travel from Canada as far as Mexico, eating thousands of insects en route, including crop pests such as moths and beetles.

Bats are dying as they fly into low-pressure zones around wind turbines. The sudden low pressure causes the air in their lungs to expand and cause tissue damage, called barotrauma. Low-pressure area: most severe immediately out from the blades and decreases as it gets closer to the centre of the turbine. There is also a low-pressure area down the shaft.

Sudden air pressure changes around wind turbines is likely behind the large numbers of migratory bats found dead in southern Alberta, according to a new University of Calgary study. The two-year study found 90 per cent of the studied bats found dead below turbines near Pincher Creek suffered severe injuries to their respiratory systems consistent with a sudden drop in air pressure that occurs near the turbine blades.

With their amazing flying and hunting abilities, bats are major predators of insect pests. But surprising numbers of bats are being killed at wind energy sites. Biologist Erin Baerwald just couldn't believe that these adept, radar-equipped flyers were simply flying into the blades. Now her research has proven her right. "We always correct that way of thinking, saying, ‘No, no, the turbines are colliding with the bats,'" Baerwald says. "But this has really changed the way we think about it, in that the bats aren't colliding with the turbines, the turbines aren't colliding with the bats. It's actually an undetectable hazard."

Canadian researchers have found wind turbines can kill bats without them actually flying into the blades. ..."An atmospheric drop in pressure at wind-turbine blades is an undetectable - and potentially unforeseeable - hazard for bats, thus partially explaining the large number of bat fatalities at these specific structures," said Baerwald.

About 140 people got another look at the coming world of wind power Friday. Birds and bats were major topics, but the basic message was that there needs to be more study of the impact of wind farms and turbines. "We're kind of finding our way along with the industry," Kathy Boydston, a biologist with Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, told the gathering at the Ambassador Hotel in Amarillo. Experts are trying to find ways to deter birds and bats from hitting turbines, but the lack of information on how many fall victim and how it happens is lacking.

David Parrish, reassigned from Magic Valley regional supervisor to Boise as fisheries program coordinator, wrote in a letter to The Times-News on July 6 that the 185-turbine China Mountain wind farm "will have negative repercussions on Idaho's wildlife." "It's a no-brainer - the footprint of a project that will cover prime habitat (for) sage grouse, mule deer, antelope and other sagebrush dependent species," Parrish wrote.

Two years ago, PPM commissioned a study to learn how many bats could be affected by its proposed wind farm. Biologists hung nets for two nights in 10 locations and caught 138 bats. Cale calculates that if 24 nets -- that's one for each turbine -- were left up through the 14 combined weeks of seasonal bat migration, more than 16,000 bats would be caught. Each net covered an area of about 1,000 square feet. That compares to 66,000 square feet carved out by a turbine's rotating blades. "It's going to be a slaughterhouse," Cale said.