Desert Bats Face the Growing, Twin Threats of White-Nose Syndrome and Wind Turbines

[NNadir]

From Inside Climate News, coming in on my email news feed:

Desert Bats Face the Growing, Twin Threats of White-Nose Syndrome and Wind Turbines

Subtitle:

Protecting the Southwest’s winged mammals from the menaces coming to their roosts and their flight paths first requires changing the public’s perspectives of the keystone species.

Inside Climate News By Emma Peterson October 6, 2023

Excerpts:

It’s only a matter of time before Arizona identifies its first case of white-nose syndrome and the disease that has killed millions of bats in the U.S. spreads throughout the Sonoran Desert. But, in the meantime, the biggest threat to bat populations in the Southwest is wind turbines.

Roughly half a million bats die each year from wind turbine collisions. Just flying close to the wind turbines can be fatal—a blade slicing nearby creates enough air pressure to kill a bat that it doesn’t strike. The 2023 State of the Bats report predicts that four bat species in the U.S. could lose more than half of their population due to wind energy facilities in the next 15 years if no mitigation measures are taken.

While bird deaths have long been cited as a drawback of wind power, the turbine’s impacts on bats could have much larger environmental impacts...

...Approximately 70 species of bats live in the Sonoran Desert. Arizona alone is home to 28 species, second only to Texas in bat diversity in the U.S. Throughout the desert, the winged mammals are crucial for the reproduction and survival of iconic plants like the region’s giant saguaro cactus and the agave that makes tequila...

...But the desert’s bats are increasingly facing pressures that have been killing those in other regions for years, putting the Southwest’s plants and crops in peril as well...

...Before 2000, collisions with wind turbines accounted for only 3 percent of bat mortalities in the U.S., but that ratio rose to 35 percent in the following decades. Today, the only thing more deadly to bats than wind turbines is white-nose syndrome. The drastic change in fatality rates coincides with a substantial increase in the number of wind turbines in the U.S. There were 4,675 wind turbines constructed from 1980 to 1999, but that number surged to 58,888 between 2000 and 2021...

The industrialization of wilderness for an affectation that has proved completely useless in addressing climate change is, in my view, a crime.

History will not forgive us, nor should it.