The Fed hides the Eagle Death Data – Watt?

David Wojick

Imagine that there is an industry product that kills thousands of products every year and is growing. The government is tracking it carefully while keeping data confidential to protect the product. Outrageous, right? But that's the case with Killing the Eagles.

Every wind-killed eagle found in an industrial wind farm will soon report to the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). Every year, each website submits an annual killing report to the FWS. None of these data is publicly available.

FWS Eagle Kills Data are all big government secrets designed to protect the wind industry from public anger. This must stop.

The public has the right to know all these eagles’ killings. Furthermore, these data will support research on methods of reducing killing. For example, it is suggested that painting the blade black will help the eagle avoid the blades. In fact, given the comprehensive killing data, many techniques can be studied.

It's no secret where all this killing data is. This is all in a large FWS database called the Injury and Mortality Reporting System (IMR), but all you can do is enter the kill data. You can't view data from anyone else, such as all kills in a given wind energy facility or a group of facilities.

Important wind energy facilities groups may include those using a given technology, or in a specific county or congressional district. There are a lot of analytics that may be important, but only FW can see all of this data. This is a government secret.

Another approach should be to ask for specific kill data, but this doesn't work either. For example, the Albany County Reserve (ACC) in Wyoming sent a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to the FWS requesting some very specific killing data from four wind projects.

When the response finally arrives, FWS says that ACC can only see 256 pages or 22% of the 1156 pages corresponding to the query. The other 910 pages are secret. 22% of available did not start answering their questions. Wind killing data is just a secret.

Additionally, each wind farm has a permit to kill up to a specified number of Eagles each year before precautions can be taken. This data is also not publicly available. I don't even have a public map or list of allowed facilities that I can find, let alone license data that can be used for analysis.

Ultimately, there is no way to see how many kills are allowed on a local or regional basis, or to analyze the attack allowances for these killing allowances. The country's figures may be hundreds of thousands.

As far as I know, the methods used by FWS are not used to calculate these kill allowances that can be used for analysis. They may allow to kill too much. I can't find published research on this topic.

There is another interest in the killing permit. FWS allows conditions to state that kill reports only need to find one-third of the actual kill.

This is the standard licensing language: “(1) Death search. (a) You must achieve at least 35% of the average annual range detection probability (taking into account spatial and temporal coverage and potential clearance or detection bias) for every five-year period of the license term.”

With a detection rate of 35%, the actual killing is about three times that found! Therefore, they know that the report number is low. It is built-in. Any research or finding based on the kill report needs to take into account possible low-ball errors. If a facility says 30 eagles were killed, it can be fair to think that it is more like 90.

Wind power killed many eagles. The federal government is tracking this destruction, but it's all a big secret. We have the right to know what is happening to our Hawks.

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