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Bird deaths down 70 percent after painting wind turbine blades:
Something as simple as black paint could be the key to reducing the number of birds that are killed each year by wind turbines. According to a study conducted at a wind farm on the Norwegian archipelago of Smøla, changing the color of a single blade on a turbine from white to black resulted in a 70-percent drop in the number of bird deaths.
Not everyone is a fan of wind turbines, however, because of their impact on local populations of flying fauna like birds and bats.
[...] Previous laboratory studies have suggested that birds may not be very good at seeing obstructions while they're flying, and adding visual cues like different colored fan blades can increase birds' chances of spotting a rapidly rotating fan.
[...] And so, in 2013, each of the four turbines in the test group had a single blade painted black. In the three years that followed, only six birds were found dead due to striking their turbine blades. By comparison, 18 bird deaths were recorded by the four control wind turbines—a 71.9-percent reduction in the annual fatality rate.
Digging into the data a little more showed some variation on bird deaths depending upon the season. During spring and autumn, fewer bird deaths were recorded at the painted turbines. But in summer, bird deaths actually increased at the painted turbines, and the authors note that the small number of turbines in the study and its relatively short duration both merit longer-term replication studies, both at Smøla and elsewhere.
Journal Reference:
Roel May, Torgeir Nygård, Ulla Falkdalen, et al. Paint it black: Efficacy of increased wind turbine rotor blade visibility to reduce avian fatalities [open], Ecology and Evolution (DOI: 10.1002/ece3.6592)
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday August 28 2020, @01:28PM (1 child)
I believe most birds see the visual spectrum, they just *also* see further outside it than us (fun fact, we can actually see a fair ways into the non-thermal infrared spectrum ourselves, but the sensitivity is so low that you need to wear goggles that completely block out the visual spectrum in order to notice it)
Besides which, black and white are (often) a little bit special - "solar-white" especially is specifically designed to reflect the full solar spectrum to reduce heat absorption (often used for roofs and space craft), so it's white across the solar spectrum, unlike most white paints which have all sorts of colors outside our visual range. Meanwhile black tends to have a lot of bleed-over outside the visible spectrum thanks to pigments spanning the entire visible spectrum. And of course solar-black, used for maximum heat gain, is black cross the solar spectrum rather than just our visual one.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Friday August 28 2020, @07:10PM
I meant to imply, but failed, that we don't know how bird's eyes *work*. Do all birds rely on rods and cones, similar to human eyes? Do the lenses work the same? What do they key on? We know that human eyes are attracted to bright lights, and to motion, but we don't even understand that *really well*.
Small example of the differences in human eyes, is looking for cracks in metal. I've witnessed a lady DOT officer direct a truck around back of the station for inspection, and cite a cracked rim as the reason. With half a dozen men inspecting that rim, two failed to ever find a crack even after it was pointed out, three had difficulty locating the crack, and the remaining guy saw it after studying the rim for only several seconds. None of the men present would have spotted the crack in a casual once-over.
If there are such dramatic differences in human vision, we certainly can't assume that different species see the same thing when they view the same structure.