Do Wind Turbines Kill Birds?

Written By Teacher: Emily Rogers

Emily has a bachelor’s degree in English and French and a master’s degree in library and information science. She spent seven years teaching information evaluation and research skills as a school librarian in K-8 public schools. As a lifelong resident of Southern Louisiana, Emily has a particular interest in how climate change affects coastal regions. She hopes to connect educators with resources that will help them to teach their students about the disproportionately adverse effects of climate change on historically marginalized communities.

Wind energy is a crucial part of reducing carbon emissions, but it also raises important environmental questions—like its impact on birds. As teachers, we want students to think critically about topics and find ways to weigh the pros and cons of climate solutions. It’s important to recognize and validate students' concerns for wildlife, while also helping them to understand wind turbines cause far fewer fatalities than other human-made structures or fossil fuel pollution. You can begin by asking students to make a pros and cons list for wind energy, then show this video and have students take notes. After the video, have students write an opinion piece on the topic or hold a class debate. Consider extending student learning by introducing this lesson that gives students the opportunity to design a local place-based proposal to improve climate resilience for migratory birds.

Written By: MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative

The MIT Climate Change Engagement Program, a part of MIT Climate HQ, provides the public with nonpartisan, easy-to-understand, and scientifically-grounded information on climate change and its solutions.

Wind turbines have long garnered scrutiny for killing birds that fly into their spinning blades or tall towers. Much of the data about bird deaths at wind facilities in the United States comes from studies published in 2013 and 2014. Those studies gave a wide range for the number of birds that die in wind turbine collisions each year: from 140,000 up to 679,000. The numbers are likely to be higher today, because many more wind farms have been built in the past decade.

Those numbers are not insignificant, but they represent a tiny fraction of the birds killed annually in other ways, like flying into buildings or caught by prowling house cats, which past studies have estimated kill up to 988 million and 4 billion birds each year, respectively. Other studies have shown that many more birds—between 12 and 64 million each year—are killed in the U.S. by power lines, which connect wind and other types of energy facilities to people who use the electricity.