By using mathematical formulas derived from these studies, the average distance of a large bird carcass found under the 2.3 MW turbines at Wolf Island would be 101 meters from their towers. This average is far outside the search areas used. The Wolf Island mortality studies used search areas of only 60 and 50 meters. These studies clearly missed most of the carcasses. It also does not account for wandering cripples and wind personal interference.

At issue is whether a plan to locate two wind farms along the Texas coast poses a threat to migratory bird species that often use the coastline as a way station on their journey south. The massive turbines, whose blades each measure 100 feet or more, could catch birds as they fly south and potentially alter a rich ecosystem that houses dozens of endangered and threatened species and a diverse landscape.

To drive through the Minnesota countryside is to drive through contradiction. Those vast rolling fields -- are they busy engines of production for the agriculture industry? Or are they places of natural beauty, serenity and tranquility? It's harder nowadays to have it both ways. The rapid advance of wind farming, for example, has transformed the rural landscape.

We shouldn't dynamite our mountain ridgelines to build a tool that can't achieve our carbon reduction objective. We shouldn't build power plants in the Kingdom when the demand is in Chittenden County. We shouldn't ignore the clear-cutting of hundreds of acres of trees that are our best carbon vacuum cleaners. We shouldn't allow runoff from miles of mountaintop roads and dozens of massive concrete base pads akin to any Wal-Mart parking lot. We shouldn't use a tool that kills off wildlife. How can anyone possibly justify such a tool receiving a permit to take endangered species?

Five years ago, when developers applied for a federal permit to build the world’s largest offshore wind-energy project off the Cape Cod coast, a widely held presumption was that the project ought to go forward because wind power is inherently good and that Nantucket Sound was as good a place as any to begin the off-shore renewable energy movement. But the Cape Wind project hasn’t moved forward and remains mired in controversy as evidence piles up that its developers chose perhaps the worst location. So, instead of leading the renewable energy movement into the future, Cape Wind may be imperiling that very movement by ignoring legitimate and serious flaws in its project.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service just completed a 97-page "biological opinion" that the 130-wind turbine project off Cape Cod will not harm the Roseate Terns. ...In several years Bird Island, the largest nesting area of Rosate Terns in North America in Buzzards Bay, will be surrounded by commercial wind turbines.

Your [Boston Globe] front page headline of March 29, "Audubon review supports wind farm" was a rush to judgment according to Vernon Lang, supervisor of Fish and Wildlife’s New England field office, the agency lead official on the Cape Wind proposal.
Editor's Note: This letter has been submitted to the Boston Globe.

There is a face-off brewing between two federal agencies over the fate of birds in Nantucket Sound, centering on the Cape Wind energy project. At issue is whether the U.S. Minerals Management Service defers to the cautionary advice of its expert peer, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, or will it ramrod the Cape Wind project forward, driven by political considerations? ...In the apparent hurry to permit the Cape Wind project this year, Minerals Management seems poised to ignore the Fish & Wildlife Service. Citizen action is needed to get the message across to Minerals Management: "Proceed with caution. Do not play 'wind turbine Russian Roulette' with endangered species. Move Cape Wind elsewhere, out of harm's way!"