Picture a huge wind turbine turning slowly against a gray sky.<\/p>\n
Its long white blades sweep around in a wide, steady arc.<\/p>\n
From a distance, the motion looks calm and easy to see.<\/p>\n
Yet every year, birds fly straight into those blades.<\/p>\n
Eagles and other raptors are\u00a0hit most often.<\/p>\n
And the reason hides in\u00a0how they see.<\/p>\n
A deadly problem in the sky<\/p>\n
Wind power is one of our cleanest sources of energy.<\/p>\n
But the spinning blades come with a real cost to wildlife.<\/p>\n
Large birds of prey are especially at risk.<\/p>\n
Eagles, hawks, and vultures all fall to the blades.<\/p>\n
They soar for hours while scanning the ground below.<\/p>\n
A hunting eagle watches the earth, not the air ahead.<\/p>\n
It locks onto a rabbit or a fish far beneath it.<\/p>\n
While it stares down, it can miss what lies in its path.<\/p>\n
Eagles evolved with no fast moving objects in the open sky.<\/p>\n
Nothing in their world ever swept toward them like this.<\/p>\n
A turbine blade can be moving shockingly fast at the tip.<\/p>\n
The outer edge can whip past at highway speeds.<\/p>\n
By the time the bird notices, it is already too late.<\/p>\n
For a soaring raptor, the open sky hides\u00a0a hidden blade.<\/p>\n
The result is a\u00a0silent toll\u00a0of birds.<\/p>\n
The trick the spinning plays<\/p>\n
There is a strange reason the blades seem to vanish.<\/p>\n
Scientists call the strange effect motion smear.<\/p>\n
When a pale blade spins very fast, it blurs into the sky.<\/p>\n
The eye can no longer hold it as a solid shape.<\/p>\n
A whirling white blade simply fades into the background.<\/p>\n
Even an eagle, with its superb eyes, is fooled.<\/p>\n
Its sharp vision cannot freeze such rapid motion.<\/p>\n
The three blades melt into one faint, ghostly circle.<\/p>\n
To the bird, the deadly rotor looks almost like nothing.<\/p>\n
So the bird flies toward a gap that is not really there.<\/p>\n
The faster the tip moves, the more it disappears.<\/p>\n
What looks like empty air is\u00a0a moving wall.<\/p>\n
The blur itself becomes\u00a0the danger.<\/p>\n
A simple idea tested in Norway<\/p>\n
Researchers wondered if they could break that blur.<\/p>\n
Their idea was almost absurdly simple.<\/p>\n
Paint just one of the three blades solid black.<\/p>\n
A single dark blade would stand out as it turned.<\/p>\n
It would give the bird something clear to see.<\/p>\n
They tried it at a wind farm on the island of Smola.<\/p>\n
Smola lies off the coast of central Norway.<\/p>\n
Its turbines had long been deadly for the local eagles.<\/p>\n
The island is home to a strong population of sea eagles.<\/p>\n
That made it the perfect place to test the idea.<\/p>\n
The team painted a black blade on four of the turbines.<\/p>\n
Nearby turbines were left all white for comparison.<\/p>\n
Then they watched the site for\u00a0many years.<\/p>\n
They counted every bird they\u00a0could find.<\/p>\n
What the black blade did<\/p>\n
Here is what those years of counting revealed.<\/p>\n
According to\u00a0one report<\/a>, the painted turbines killed about 72 percent fewer birds.<\/p>\n That is a huge drop from just a single can of black paint.<\/p>\n The effect was strongest for large birds of prey.<\/p>\n After the blades were painted, no dead eagles were found.<\/p>\n The white tailed eagle, once a victim, stopped colliding.<\/p>\n Not one of them was found dead after the change.<\/p>\n One black blade had made the whole rotor visible.<\/p>\n The blur was broken, and the danger became clear.<\/p>\n Birds could finally see the sweep and steer around it.<\/p>\n A problem that seemed impossible had a cheap fix.<\/p>\n A little black paint became\u00a0a life saver.<\/p>\n The wind turbine had turned\u00a0far less deadly.<\/p>\n Why it is not everywhere yet<\/p>\n If it works so well, then why not paint every one of them?<\/p>\n The answer is that it is not so easy in practice.<\/p>\n Painting a blade high in the air is slow and costly.<\/p>\n Each blade can be dozens of meters long.<\/p>\n Crews must reach it and repaint without harming the turbine.<\/p>\n The Norway study also covered just a handful of turbines.<\/p>\n Scientists want to repeat it at bigger sites first.<\/p>\n They need to know it works with other birds and places.<\/p>\n Some offshore projects have already started testing the idea.<\/p>\n New turbines could even be painted before they go up.<\/p>\n According to\u00a0one account<\/a>, the black blade trick is drawing wide interest.<\/p>\n The same push to blend clean power with wildlife shows up elsewhere, from a\u00a0solar farm<\/a>\u00a0fox to the seals near an\u00a0offshore wind farm<\/a>.<\/p>\n For the moment, the answer may be one bold stripe of black.<\/p>\n Sometimes the smartest fix is also\u00a0the simplest one, painted\u00a0one blade at a time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Picture a huge wind turbine turning slowly against a gray sky. Its long white blades sweep around in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":824092,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[49,48,295,66],"class_list":["post-824091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-environment","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=824091"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824091\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/824092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=824091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=824091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=824091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}