Charlotte McDonald

speaker

483 appearances 11 recordings 2 series first heard Feb 2012 last heard 11 Jun

Charlotte McDonald’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The problem is that dead birds are hard to count.

Sometimes small birds get missed.

Sometimes wild animals eat dead birds before they're counted.

The number and type of dead birds also varies depending on the location.

To account for the bird count problems, scientists try to model the number of birds that might die but not be counted.

Hence, the big range of answers.

Hannah thinks that because there's a risk of under-reporting in the dead bird count, the higher numbers are more likely to be in the right ballpark.

So Hannah reckons a figure of maybe one to two million birds being killed every year looks justifiable.

President Trump is roughly right.

As long as you think millions means two million and not a hundred million.

But as so often on this programme, the numbers don't tell the whole story.

And it's not just cats that are more deadly for birds than wind turbines.

One thing that's definitely not true is that wind turbines are killing all the birds.

The back of an envelope calculation is even harder for the total US bird population.

But Hannah had a look at the data to try and give us a rough idea.

Birds also often reproduce pretty fast and have quite short lifespans.

So there's a lot going on in this number.

So what's the final verdict?

Should the number of birds being killed make us reconsider our use of wind turbines?

Thanks to Hannah Ritchie, Deputy Editor at Our World in Data and Senior Researcher at the University of Oxford.

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