“Bald and golden eagles are protected by state and federal laws. Slaughtering eagles is illegal, and nothing is ‘incidental’ or ‘unavoidable’ when it comes to enormous wind turbines.”

“Creating a vast imaginary population of eagles, avoiding true scientific research, falsely calculating an enormous, supposedly “sustainable” yearly harvest rate, and deliberately ignoring the huge eagle slaughter taking place around the wind farms really is fraud. The perpetrators should be prosecuted.”

[Editor note: This post completes Part I and Part II from last week.]

The word harvest connotes the reaping of editable crops to sustain humanity. As used by the Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS), “harvesting” is the killing of one of our most iconic species, one of our most magnificent raptors, by the “grim reaper” wind turbines.

Turbines supply some of our most expensive, unreliable, and heavily subsidized electricity, under blanket exemptions from the Endangered Species Act and other environmental laws that are applied with unflinching severity to virtually every other industry. …

On May 6, 2016 the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and Department of the Interior announced a plan that would set massive industry “bag limits” (permission or license to kill) for an eagle population that in many areas of America no longer or barely exists. In the case of the golden eagle, most of this eagle harvest will come from migratory eagles that nest outside the Lower 48 U.S. states. This is Part II of a four-part series which began yesterday. 

Since 1997, when the Department of Interior’s Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) repository first disclosed that wind turbines were a major cause of eagle deaths, wind energy has increased its deadly footprint by more than tenfold into golden eagle habitats in the western United States.

The FWS’s Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (DPEIS) created for the Eagle Rule Revision completely ignored the many thousands of eagle carcasses and autopsy records that exist in the Denver repository. …

“No individual and no other industry is allowed to kill even one bald eagle, much less 4,200 – much less do so year after year.”

“We are witnessing a government wildlife agency that was created to protect highly important species now laying out a red carpet so a devastating industry can kill many more thousands of eagles. The Fish & Wildlife Service might as well be sending an invitation to anyone in the Lower 48 to kill these iconic birds.”

Although I had been studying raptors and wildlife for decades, 2008 was the year I first became aware of the terrible fate that the industrial wind power industry was inflicting on our eagles. Since then, I have shared written many articles pointing out how this industry uses bogus research and devious methods to hide its slaughter of bald and golden eagles and other species.…