Golden Eagle and California Condor Wind Power Mitigation, Baja California, Mexico
Project: California condor populations still face several major challenges to their recovery. A new emerging threat is posed by wind energy developments that can incidentally injure or kill birds through collision with spinning wind turbines. Wind power has the potential to be an environmentally friendly form of renewable power generation, but it can also adversely affect bird populations. A recent published study estimated that around half a million birds are killed annually in the USA from collision with wind turbines, including 83,000 raptor fatalities. While SDZG supports clean renewable energy endeavors, it also recognizes the urgent need to ensure that green energy developments are informed by sound science so they do not negatively impact species and habitats of concern.There has not been a verifiable case of a California condor being killed as result of an impact with a wind farm turbine. However, there are currently only around 200 condors flying in the wild and their home ranges have not yet overlapped significantly with wind farm sites. Wind energy developments are rapidly expanding into condor historical ranges to meet the increasing demand for renewable energy. As condor populations continue to grow and as their ranges also expand the likelihood of interactions with wind energy developments increases along with the risk of collision injury. For example, in 2007 a condor tracked by SDZG flew across the middle of a proposed wind farm in northern Baja, Mexico. With such a small and fragile population the death of just one condor is considered a blow to their recovery, especially if the affected bird is a breeding adult. Hence, it is vital that effective solutions to mitigate the potential impacts of wind farms are developed and successfully implemented at this critical juncture in conservation management planning for the recovery of the California condor.
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Role: I managed this programme from 2011-2015, bringing it to the forefront of applying cutting-edge technologies to remotely track the movements of wild condors, including miniaturized wing-mounted GPS tags that enable condors to be monitored at high resolution 24/7. These location data and the ecological models they support provided us with important information on how condors move through and select habitats – information that can be used to help guide the planning process for proposed wind farms and minimize their overlap with areas of core habitat that are intensively used by wild condors. I worked with Post Doctoral student Dr James Sheppard, who was designing a novel early-warning system that can alert users to the presence of a condor nearing a wind farm. These new GPS tracking tags use the cellular GSM network to transmit the bird’s location in near real-time. When the bird crosses over a predetermined virtual boundary (a ‘geofence’) established around a wind farm site an autonomous alert message is sent to San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance condor managers and to the wind farm operators so that appropriate collision avoidance actions can be taken (e.g. shutting down turbines until the bird leaves the vicinity). I faciliatated meetings with key Sempra wind power company representatives to present our results and I coordinated new bids to win continued funding contracts to address design issues and continue our research and development.
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