Wind Turbines Kill Bats by Impersonating Trees

Survival tip: don't hang around machines that have giant spinning blades. It's a lesson bats have been slow to learn, judging by the large numbers of their corpses found beneath wind turbines. New video footage suggests some bats are attracted to wind farms because they can't tell turbines apart from trees. If it's true, this might help us find ways to keep them safer. "I wish we knew for sure" how big a problem wind farms pose to bats, says USGS research biologist Paul Cryan. Other researchers have estimated that tens of thousands—or even hundreds of thousands—of bats are killed every year by wind turbines in the U.S. and Canada. Without a good idea of the population sizes of these bats, it's hard to put those numbers in perspective. But we do know that bats have long lives and reproduce slowly, which makes them vulnerable. "Bat populations do not respond ...