Subject: Antennas Kill 40 Million Birds Per Year (Beaver)..
Date: Mon, 8 May 2000 221404 -0500 (CDT)
From: "Roy L. Beavers"
To: emfguru
--------------------------------------------------
........Chris says that "silence is being maintained by $$$$$$$$".....
Yes..........
Those who **rationalize** their silence call it "credibility"......
Yes............
What do you call it.......????
Roy Beavers (EMFguru)
roy@emfguru.com
.....It is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness.....
NEW!!! Website... http://emfguru.com
...................People are more important than profits.................
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 08 May 2000 19:53:19 -0700
From: Christopher Beaver
To: "Roy L. Beavers"
Subject: Antennas Kill 40 Million Birds Per Year
Dear Roy:
Shortly after sending you my previous e-mail, I received the May issue
of The Gull, the newsletter of the Golden Gate Chapter (San Francisco)
of the Audubon Society.
It contained an article I wrote concerning the death toll among
migrating birds caused by telecommunication antennas. Even though some
of this information has been cited in the forum, particularly by Don
Maisch, I'd like to share what I've written with the group. After all,
my efforts were sparked by several exchanges of information in the forum
and several private reviews of the text-in-progress including helpful
remarks by Bertha Dumpe.
One final thought before the article: based on my interviews with
researchers and public policy advocates, more is known and even more
suspected about the hazards of radiofrequency and microwave radiation
than is openly acknowledged. The silence is enforced with money: people
fear losing their funding or their jobs. The code word that marks the
point of no return seems to be people's desire to maintain their
"credibility." I say this even as I acknowledge that I am stepping
outside the circle to say even this much.
MILLIONS OF BIRDS KILLED EVERY YEAR BY TELECOMMUNICATIONS ANTENNAS
by Christopher Beaver, 394 Elizabeth Street, San Francisco CA 94114
e-mail: idgfilms@earthlink.net, tel: 415-824-5822
[Two paragraphs appear in this version of the article that did not
appear in The Gull. They were cut solely for purposes of length and I'm
extremely happy to restore them as I continue to "shop" the article around.]
Each year as the great autumn and spring migrations of more than five
billion birds unfolds across the North American continent, more and more
of the migrants are being killed in collisions with wireless
telecommunication antennas. These include antennas for cellular phones,
radio and television.
Most of the collisions take place at night as does much of the
migration. Birds that generate a great deal of heat in flight, such as
ducks and geese, avoid the warm temperatures and direct sunlight of
day-time. Smaller birds also seek darkness, but for purposes of stealth,
to hide from predators.
To navigate, the migrating birds track the stars and gauge the shifting
magnetic fields of the earth.
The problem, according to Vernon Kleen, an avian ecologist for the
Illinois Department of Natural Resources, is that under adverse weather
conditions, night-flying birds seem drawn to the antennas’ warning
lights. The lights are required by the Federal Communications Commission
for all antennas over two hundred feet. In the vicinity of airports,
towers above 500 feet must carry either red blinking lights or white
strobing lights.
When birds encounter these lights, they appear to become confused. On
radar screens, scientists have observed groups of birds as they circle
the antennas in an apparent and often futile attempt to regain their
sense of direction.
In January of 1998, some 10,000 Lapland Longspurs were killed in a
single night as they collided with a 420-foot tower and its guy wires in
western Kansas. Many of them were found impaled on stubble left over
from the wheat harvest in surrounding fields. The birds appeared to have
flown full force into the ground.
In a letter written this past December to William Kennard, chair of the
Federal Communications Commission, Gerald Winegrad, vice-president of
the American Bird Conservancy, estimated that "the annual killing of
migratory birds from communication towers may be four million, to an
order of magnitude above this." An order of magnitude would mean that
the death toll may be as high as forty million birds per year.
Surveys of the birds killed are difficult to conduct since the number of
affected birds varies widely during the migration while scavengers
quickly erase the evidence as they carry away the victims. But according
to Jim Cox of the Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission (reported
in the Tallahassee Democrat ), the "average" tower may kill as many as
2,500 birds per year.
As astonishing as these figures may sound, they have been accepted by
the American Ornithologists’ Union, the Association of Field
Ornithologists, the Cooper Ornithological Society and the Wilson
Ornithological Society.
"This is a real problem and we take it very seriously," said Al
Manville, a wildlife biologist for the United States Fish and Wildlife
Service in Arlington, Virginia. "Of the 836 bird species entrusted to
our care, nearly 200 are already threatened."
Due to the "build out" of cellular antennas as competing phone companies
struggle to provide blanket coverage, as many as 500,000 new cellular
antennas will be constructed over the next decade. A separate
technology, digital television, mandated by Congress for full
implementation by 2003, will require more than 1,000 "megatowers," each
of them at least 1,000 feet high, according to Manville.
Despite more than one hundred studies in the scientific literature
confirming the impact of antennas on birds, Sheldon Moss, director of
government relations at the Personal Communications Industry
Association, was quoted in the Morning Star of Wilmington, North
Carolina as believing that, "We’re in the very early stages, and clearly
there needs to be more work done to determine if a problem exists and,
if a problem does exist, how severe it is."
Several major ornithological organizations disagree. In 1999, the
American Bird Conservancy demanded a full Environmental Impact Statement
for a proposed cellular antenna in Pennsylvania and quoted a 1976 study
by Canadian wildlife biologist, R.C. Weir that stated:
"Nocturnal bird kills are virtually certain wherever an obstacle extends
into the air space where birds are flying in migration. The time of
year, siting, height, lighting, cross-sectional area [the size] of the
obstacles, and weather conditions will determine the magnitude of the kill."
Libby Kelley, Executive Director of the Council on Wireless
Telecommunications Impacts, points out the difficulties local regulators
and citizens face: "According to some interpretations of the 1996
federal Telecommunications Act, which was largely written by industry
lobbyists, neither municipalities nor federal agencies are permitted to
consider any environmental issues or even human public health impacts
when determining where towers can be constructed."
For Al Manville of U.S. Fish and Game, the bottom line may be that
industry will have to choose between the "carrot and the stick." The
"carrot," in Manville’s words: a voluntary partnership among all parties
to prevent or limit "tower kills."
The stick: criminal prosecution under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of
1916 that states that it is illegal to kill a migratory bird "by any
means or in any manner," except for "permitted purposes," which includes
hunting and the taking of birds for scientific research.
To date, the carrot approach appears to have produced some results. A
Communication Tower Working Group was formed in 1999 largely at the
instigation of Manville and Bill Evans, an ornithologist who in turn had
organized an August 1998 symposium at Cornell’s Laboratory of
Ornithology on the issue. With the United States Fish and Wildlife
Service as the sponsoring organization, the working group met in
November of 1999 as a first step toward establishing research guidelines
for future collision studies.
Manville, who estimates that such studies would cost about five to eight
million dollars and take three to five years to complete, also notes
that neither his own agency, the United States Fish and Wildlife
Service, nor the Federal Communications Commission has the funding or
the staff for such an effort.
While Manville agrees that further study is necessary to pinpoint the
precise factors that account for most tower collisions including the
possibility of adverse effects from microwave radiation, he also
believes that enough is known to begin taking precautionary steps.
Among these would be the gathering of antennas in centralized
"co-locations," the removal of obsolete antennas; the distancing of
antennas from critical habitat; and a two hundred-foot height limit on
new antennas that would free them from Communications Commission
guidelines that require antennas over two hundred feet to carry warning
lights and be supported by guy wires.
Until such measures are introduced, the question is not whether more
birds will be killed. The question is whether we are one step closer to
achieving the nightmarish world of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring : with
the songs and calls of migrating birds silenced by the twittering of
cellphones and the din from hundreds of new digital television stations.
[end]
Thank you, Roy, for maintaining the lines of communication for all of us,
Christopher Beaver
Archive provided courtesy of WaveGuide, http://www.wave-guide.org
Reprinted with permission of Roy Beavers, http://www.emfguru.com