The incredible 2003 documentary Winged Migration taught me I'm more passionate about birds than I realized.

So did risking frostbite in December, 2004, when I tromped through woods for more than four hours in 11-below wind chill with hard-core birders during the National Audubon Society's annual Christmas Bird Count. And when I spent a gorgeous Saturday in September, 2005, at southeastern Michigan's Hawkfest, watching raptors come down from Canada and get lifted skyward by large columns of warm, rising air called thermals.

Birds are cool. How can you not be enamored of creatures that have evolved from dinosaurs and traversed the globe from above for thousands of years?

On Thursday, America's first State of the Birds report was released at the National Press Club in Washington, the product of more than 40 years of research compiled by an unprecedented partnership of government wildlife agencies and conservation groups. See www.stateofthebirds.org.

Predictably, it sounded an alarm about habitat loss and declines in bird populations while being tempered by a few successes, including the inspirational recovery of the American bald eagle.

Some sneered about it being repackaged data, but I found it a handy overview in a relatively manageable 36 pages. It got me thinking about our future here in western Lake Erie.

Not the birds' future. Ours.

Let's set aside the issue of how unwisely our shoreline was chiseled up years ago and move straight to energy production, an emerging issue that transcends anything from the family budget to national security.

Birds are sentinels of ecological health, canaries in a coal mine. The report noted climate change becoming as devastating to them as habitat loss; undoubtedly, the two are related.

Today, there's a budding interest in wind power to help combat climate change - as there should be. It's been largely unharnessed. It's time has come, even if it's just to help supplement other more traditional forms of power.

Western Lake Erie is emerging as an epicenter for the debate over where to build giant, commercial-sized wind turbines.

It's where the wind and wildlife issues collide.

Optimal winds are offshore. Western Lake Erie is the shallowest part of the Great Lakes, close to electrical transmission lines and within reach of millions of people who live between Detroit and Cleveland.

From a developer's standpoint, it makes sense to put up turbines out in the lake near Toledo.

From a bird's perspective, it doesn't. Western Lake Erie sits in the path of two of North America's most important flyways.

Here's a stat for you: One billion birds. The report said that's the number that die each year from collisions with man-made obstacles such as buildings, transmission towers, power lines, and, yes, wind turbines.

The Government Accountability Office has held up the Altamont Pass Wind Resource Area near San Francisco as the poster boy for bad siting.

With 5,000 turbines in the heart of a major flyway, it has been blamed for the deaths of thousands of hawks, golden eagles, and other raptors. According to one study, it is responsible for more than 90 percent of the nation's annual raptor kills attributable to wind power, the GAO has said.

Politics has a way of pushing aside science when economic pressures become intense enough.

Can offshore wind power and wildlife co-exist in western Lake Erie?

Perhaps. It's the subject of ongoing research now, answers to which are critical to our region's future.

Bad information and we're either the next Altamont Pass or passing up the chance to prove offshore wind power can be done affordably and effectively in some of the most ecologically sensitive areas.

We have the benefit of precedent. If it's going to be done, it must be done right.