I've posted before on ways to make wind turbines less destructive of birds, bats, etc. (I've also posted on the fact that wind turbines are much less destructive of birds, bats, etc, than most people think.)
Now, another study, recently published in the journal Behavioural Ecology, shows that birds are much more likely to avoid turbine blades that are painted to minic venemous snakes or frogs. It makes a lot of intuitive sense: neither birds nor bats are particularly sophisticated intellectually, and operate much more on short-range instincts.
Almost all wind turbines and their blades are painted bright white, for reasons I have never understood. For reasons no-one really seems understand, that is the very colour that attracts birds towards them. It has been known for some years that even just painting one of the blades black significantly reduces bird collisions, and yet I have still never seen a wind turbine painted anything other than white.
The latest study demonstrates definitively that birds are least likely to avoid white blades, followed by blades where one is painted black. However, they are much more lilely to avoid blades painted red and white, or rad, black and yellow (to mimic a venemous coral snake). The differences are apparently quite dramatic.
Personally, I think that brightly-coloured striped wind turbines would be an improvement aesthetically - plain vanilla white is so blah - although I'm not sure everyone would agree.
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