How many eagles are wind turbines killing? No one knows because the US government is keeping it a secret

Wind power is killing a lot of eagles. The US federal government is tracking this destruction, but it is all a big secret. We have a right to know what is happening to our eagles, writes David Wojick.

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By way of introduction to Wojick’s article that follows, we highlight the destruction caused by so-called “green” or “renewable” energy.

Wind turbines can spin up to 200 mph at their tips, posing a significant threat to birds. A 2013 study estimated that up to 328,000 birds are killed annually across the US by monopole turbines. Another study estimates that approximately 681,000 birds are killed by wind turbines in the US each year. A more recent study modelled the death rate at the start of 2021 and concluded that 1.17 million birds are killed by wind turbines in the US each year.

The case against NextEra demonstrates how wantonly destructive wind farm operators are. In 2022, a subsidiary of NextEra Energy, ESI Energy, pleaded guilty to killing at least 150 eagles at its wind farms across eight states in the US over the previous decade. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act and the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act prohibit killing, capturing or transporting protected migratory bird species without a permit. ESI Energy failed to obtain necessary permits and took no steps to protect eagles, giving it an advantage over competitors that did take such steps.^[3]

Conventional Wind Energy – A Design Deadly for Birds, American Eagle Foundation
How Many Birds Are Killed by Wind Turbines? American Bird Conservancy, 26 January 2021
Wind energy company pleads guilty to killing at least 150 eagles, The Guardian, 11 April 2022
Our Hero – A little bird in Australia defeats Net Zero Zealots, The Exposé, 19 December 2022
Wind farms are destroying wildlife while environmental organisations accept millions of dollars from wind energy companies, The Exposé, 7 October 2023
Labour unilaterally overturns restrictions on onshore wind turbines, The Exposé, 10 July 2024
Starmer pushes ahead with a state-owned “green energy” investment company which will be devastating to nature, The Exposé, 26 July 2024

The Feds Are Hiding the Eagle Death Data

By David Wojick as published by The Heartland Institute on 3 April 2025

Imagine there is an industry product that is killing thousands a year and the number is growing. The government is tracking it closely, while keeping the data secret in order to protect the product. Outrageous, right? But that is exactly the case with wind power killing eagles.

Every wind-killed eagle found at an industrial wind site is quickly reported to the federal Fish and Wildlife Service (“FWS”). Every year, each site also submits an annual kill report to FWS. None of this data is publicly available.

The FWS eagle kill data is all a big government secret designed to protect the wind industry from public outrage. This has to stop.

The public has a right to know about all these eagle kills. In addition, this data would support research on ways to reduce the killing. For example, it has been suggested that painting the blades black would help the eagles avoid the blades. In fact, there are a lot of technologies that could be studied given comprehensive kill data.

It is no secret where all this kill data is. It is all in one big FWS database called the Injury and Mortality Reporting System (“IMR”), but all you can do is enter your kill data. You cannot look at anyone else’s data such as all the kills in a given wind facility or group of facilities.

Important wind facility groups might include those using a given technology, or in a specific county or congressional district. There are lots of analyses that might be important, but only FWS can see all this data. It is a government secret.

Another approach should be to ask for specific kill data, but that does not work either. For example, the Wyoming-based Albany County Conservancy (“ACC”) sent FWS a Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) request for some very specific kill data from four wind projects.

When the response finally came, FWS said ACC could only see 256 pages or 22% of the 1156 pages that corresponded to their query. The other 910 pages were secret. The available 22% did not begin to answer their questions. The wind-kill data is simply secret.

In addition, every wind site has a permit to kill up to a specified number of eagles a year before preventive action must be taken. None of this data is publicly available either. There is not even a public map or list of permitted facilities that I can find, much less permit data available for analysis.

Ultimately, there is no way to see how many kills are being allowed on a local or regional basis, or to analyse these kill allowances for impact. The national numbers may be in the tens or hundreds of thousands.

Nor is the method used by FWS to calculate these kill allowances available for analysis, as far as I can tell. They may be allowing too much killing. I can find no published research on this topic.

There is another point of interest in the kill permits. The FWS permit conditions state that the kill reports only have to find about a third of the actual kills.

Here is the standard permit language: “(1) Fatality Searches. (a) You must achieve an average annual site-wide probability of detection (accounting for spatial and temporal coverage, as well as potential scavenging or detection bias) of at least 35% for every Five-Year period during the permit tenure.”

At this 35% detection rate, the actual kills would be roughly three times those found! So they know the report numbers are way low. It is built in. Any research or findings based on the kill reports need to take this likely low-ball error into account. If a facility says 30 eagles were killed, it is fair to assume it was more like 90.

Wind power is killing a lot of eagles. The federal government is tracking this destruction, but it is all a big secret. We have a right to know what is happening to our eagles.

First published at CFACT.

About the Author

David Wojick is a former consultant with the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the US Department of Energy in the area of information and communication science.

A fuller biography can be found on DeSmog HERE. It should be noted that DeSmog’s aim is to document “climate science denial.” It maintains several databases of people and organisations engaged in “misinformation” and lobbying against “addressing climate change.” DeSmog is a partner in the Covering Climate Now project, which organises and assists news organisations (such as The New York Times, The Guardian, BBC and Forbes) in covering climate change worldwide. DeSmog continues to expand its focus to other areas of “misinformation” such as meeting the world’s energy needs and confronting “environmental racism.” In short, DeSmog is an establishment mouthpiece; its sole purpose is to propagate the establishment’s narrative. It is in this context that the information DeSmog publishes must be read so that the establishment misinformation and disinformation that pollute its blogs can be filtered out accordingly.

Featured image: A Golden Eagle flies near wind turbines. Source: For Golden Eagles, It’s Poorly Sited Wind Turbines that Spell Trouble, American Bird Conservancy, 29 August 2024

While previously it was a hobby culminating in writing articles for Wikipedia (until things made a drastic and undeniable turn in 2020) and a few books for private consumption, since March 2020 I have become a full-time researcher and writer in reaction to the global takeover that came into full view with the introduction of covid-19. For most of my life, I have tried to raise awareness that a small group of people planned to take over the world for their own benefit. There was no way I was going to sit back quietly and simply let them do it once they made their final move.