Millions of birds are dying every year – what can we do to protect them from the growing electrical network?
It is a painful clip to watch – an elegant swan in flight collides with the highest wire strung above power cables and sinks to earth in a tangle of bent and broken feathers. In another incident caught on video, a startled white-tailed eagle crashes into overhead cables and drops like a stone after a sudden flash.
Singed feathers and tell-tale burns can reveal how a bird died, but if these incidents had not been filmed they might have passed unremarked. In the UK and across most of the world, no one is required to count the millions of birds that crash into or are electrocuted by live overhead wires spanning the countryside. Eagles, storks, bustards, vultures and other endangered species – not to mention hapless crows, pigeons, starlings and magpies – meet their death on power lines, and there is currently no UK policy to deal with this.
Millions of animals and birds die every year...