Dr Hannah Ritchie

speaker

48 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 18 Apr

Dr Hannah Ritchie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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More or Less · Is Trump right that wind turbines are killing millions of birds? · 18 Apr 2026 podcast

It's not completely wrong.

I think with this statement, the S on the millions is probably doing some heavy lifting.

I think my best estimate is that in the US, wind turbines probably kill between one and two million birds every year.

So with the million statement, that's broadly right, but I think it's missing a lot of context.

Yeah, so figuring this number is very difficult.

I mean, there's no big national database where we store all of the different birds killed by wood turbines every year.

It's often extrapolated from the smaller scale studies.

So what researchers will do is that they'll go out to a wind farm and they'll basically count the number of bird carcasses that they find.

So most of the studies I looked at were in the range of four to 18 birds killed per wind turbine per year.

So that's a fourfold difference.

So the difference there is large.

Some particular species such as eagles, raptors, shore-like birds, they tend to be at higher risk.

And that's for a couple of reasons.

The main one being that they will often use kind of ridge tops to get lift when they're flying.

And that's obviously a very, very good spot to put a wind turbine.

It's very windy there.

You'll also get migratory birds that will go through the same spot over and over again through migration patterns.

And they also tend to be at higher risk.

So if we take the range of figures for the number of birds killed per turbine per year in the US, so 4 to 18, we multiply that by the number of turbines in the US, we get this estimate between 300,000 and about 1.3 million birds killed across the US every year.

So naturally picking the higher number is maybe more honest and adjust for that.

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