What’s black and white and spins? Wind turbines that don’t kill birds

Picture yourself driving down a local highway, passing familiar street signs and encountering typical traffic. Then, without warning, you find a cow standing in the middle of the road. You slam on your brakes, but it’s too late to avoid a collision.

Something similar happens to seabirds when they encounter wind turbines, especially when they’re looking down, rather than ahead, in search of food, says Graham Martin, an ornithologist and bird vision expert at the University of Birmingham in the U.K.

“If you’re an eagle and you’re flying along, you may have fantastic, high spatial resolution vision,” Martin tells Mongabay. “But if you turn your head to look down, you just don’t look where you’re going. But of course, that’s always worked [for birds] in the past; that’s never been a problem. It’s just now that we put things in the way for them.”

In a recent paper published in Global Ecology and Conservation, Martin and his colleague, Alex Banks of Natural England, an independent government agency, proposed a new strategy for mitigating collisions between seabirds and wind turbines. It involves painting a black-and-white pattern on turbines to produce a flickering effect while moving, thereby warning birds of a turbine’s existence — and hopefully reducing deaths.

This technique, which has yet to be tested, builds upon an earlier suggestion from a 2020 study of painting one turbine blade black to reduce bird fatalities. Martin says he believes this other technique worked because it also created a flickering effect when the black blade moved in front of the white pylon. However, he says the strategy he proposes in the new paper would generate a more robust signal since all three blades and the pylon would be painted in a black-and-white pattern. Black And White Dr Who Cotton Tote Bag