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Cell Phones Kills 40 Million Birds (23/7/02)
Tramès per Klaus Rudolph (Citizens'
Initiative Omega)
Jeffrey St. Clair
sitka@home.com
Tue, 09 May 2000
May issue, The Gull, the newsletter of the Golden Gate (San Francisco)
Chapter of the Audubon Society. MILLIONS OF BIRDS KILLED EVERY YEAR BY
TELECOMMUNICATIONS ANTENNAS by Christopher Beaver, 394 Elizabeth
Street, San Francisco CA 94114
e-mail: idgfilms@earthlink.net,
tel: 415-824-5822
Each year as the great autumn and spring migrations of more than five
billion birds unfolds across the North American continent, more and more
of the migrants are being killed in collisions with wireless telecommunication
antennas. These include antennas for cellular phones, radio and television.
Most of the collisions take place at night as does much of the migration.
Birds that generate a great deal of heat in flight, such as ducks and
geese, avoid the warm temperatures and direct sunlight of day-time. Smaller
birds also seek darkness, but for purposes of stealth, to hide from predators.
To navigate, the migrating birds track the stars and gauge the shifting
magnetic fields of the earth. The problem, according to Vernon Kleen,
an avian ecologist for the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, is
that under adverse weather conditions, night-flying birds seem drawn to
the antennas' warning lights. The lights are required by the Federal Communications
Commission for all antennas over two hundred feet. In the vicinity of
airports, towers above 500 feet must carry either red blinking lights
or white strobing lights. When birds encounter these lights, they appear
to become confused. On radar screens, scientists have observed groups
of birds as they circle the antennas in an apparent and often futile attempt
to regain their sense of direction. In January of 1998, some 10,000 Lapland
Longspurs were killed in a single night as they collided with a 420-foot
tower and its guy wires in western Kansas. Many of them were found impaled
on stubble left over from the wheat harvest in surrounding fields. The
birds appeared to have flown full force into the ground.
In a letter written this past December to William Kennard, chair of the
Federal Communications Commission, Gerald Winegrad, vice-president of
the American Bird Conservancy, estimated that "the annual killing
of migratory birds from communication towers may be four million, to an
order of magnitude above this." An order of magnitude would mean
that the death toll may be as high as forty million birds per year. Surveys
of the birds killed are difficult to conduct since the number of affected
birds varies widely during the migration while scavengers quickly erase
the evidence as they carry away the victims. But according to Jim Cox
of the Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission (reported in the Tallahassee
Democrat ), the "average" tower may kill as many as 2,500 birds
per year. As astonishing as these figures may sound, they have been accepted
by the American Ornithologists' Union, the Association of Field Ornithologists,
the Cooper Ornithological Society and the Wilson Ornithological Society.
"This is a real problem and we take it very seriously," said
Al Manville, a wildlife biologist for the United States Fish and Wildlife
Service in Arlington, Virginia. "Of the 836 bird species entrusted
to our care, nearly 200 are already threatened." Due to the "build
out" of cellular antennas as competing phone companies struggle to
provide blanket coverage, as many as 500,000 new cellular antennas will
be constructed over the next decade. A separate technology, digital television,
mandated by Congress for full implementation by 2003, will require more
than 1,000 "megatowers," each of them at least 1,000 feet high,
according to Manville. Despite more than one hundred studies in the scientific
literature confirming the impact of antennas on birds, Sheldon Moss, director
of government relations at the Personal Communications Industry Association,
was quoted in the Morning Star of Wilmington, North Carolina as believing
that, "We're in the very early stages, and clearly there needs to
be more work done to determine if a problem exists and, if a problem does
exist, how severe it is." Several major ornithological organizations
disagree.
In 1999, the American Bird Conservancy demanded a full Environmental Impact
Statement for a proposed cellular antenna in Pennsylvania and quoted a
1976 study by Canadian wildlife biologist, R.C. Weir that stated: "Nocturnal
bird kills are virtually certain wherever an obstacle extends into the
air space where birds are flying in migration. The time of year, siting,
height, lighting, cross-sectional area [the size] of the obstacles, and
weather conditions will determine the magnitude of the kill." Libby
Kelley, Executive Director of the Council on Wireless Telecommunications
Impacts, points out the difficulties local regulators and citizens face:
"According to some interpretations of the 1996 federal Telecommunications
Act, which was largely written by industry lobbyists, neither municipalities
nor federal agencies are permitted to consider any environmental issues
or even human public health impacts when determining where towers can
be constructed."
For Al Manville of U.S. Fish and Game, the bottom line may be that industry
will have to choose between the "carrot and the stick." The
"carrot," in Manville's words: a voluntary partnership among
all parties to prevent or limit "tower kills." The stick: criminal
prosecution under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1916 that states that
it is illegal to kill a migratory bird "by any means or in any manner,"
except for "permitted purposes," which includes hunting and
the taking of birds for scientific research. To date, the carrot approach
appears to have produced some results. A Communication Tower Working Group
was formed in 1999 largely at the instigation of Manville and Bill Evans,
an ornithologist who in turn had organized an August 1998 symposium at
Cornell's Laboratory of Ornithology on the issue. With the United States
Fish and Wildlife Service as the sponsoring organization, the working
group met in November of 1999 as a first step toward establishing research
guidelines for future collision studies. Manville, who estimates that
such studies would cost about five to eight million dollars and take three
to five years to complete, also notes that neither his own agency, the
United States Fish and Wildlife Service, nor the Federal Communications
Commission has the funding or the staff for such an effort. While Manville
agrees that further study is necessary to pinpoint the precise factors
that account for most tower collisions including the possibility of adverse
effects from microwave radiation, he also believes that enough is known
to begin taking precautionary steps. Among these would be the gathering
of antennas in centralized "co-locations," the removal of obsolete
antennas; the distancing of antennas from critical habitat; and a two
hundred-foot height limit on new antennas that would free them from Communications
Commission guidelines that require antennas over two hundred feet to carry
warning lights and be supported by guy wires. Until such measures are
introduced, the question is not whether more birds will be killed. The
question is whether we are one step closer to achieving the nightmarish
world of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring: with the songs and calls of migrating
birds silenced by the twittering of cellphones and the din from hundreds
of new digital television stations.
Message by Céline Bernadet
22.07.02
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