25X More Than the Number of Birds Killed by Exxon Valdez Spill
from TreeHugger.com by Michael Graham Richard - Science / Natural Sciences
Every single year, the 84,000 communication towers spread around North-America kill an estimated 6.8 million birds. Some of these towers can be 2,000 feet high and surrounded by a large number of dangerous guy wires that help keep the towers upright. To put things in context, the infamous Exxon Valdez oil spill killed about 250,000 birds, and the Empire State building is 1,250 feet high, so we truly are talking about very tall towers and a very large number of birds killed.
The taller the tower the greater the threat, the study found. The 1,000 or so towers above 900 feet accounted for only 1.6 percent of the total number of towers. Yet these skyscraper towers killed 70 percent of the birds, about 4.5 million a year, said lead author Travis Longcore, associate professor in the USC Spatial Sciences Institute at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences..
The author does a very good job explaining it, so please check out the video below:
These birds are worth saving just because of their intrinsic value, but on top of that they also provide many services to us, such as eating insects and keeping our forests healthy.
Via USC News
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