[I don’t usually go around agreeing with Trump, but I won’t defend windmills when it comes to bird-killing… and noise. Eventually we’ll need to quit trying to supply power for quite so many humans…]

<https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3k3vd8/millions-of-birds-are-vacuumed-to
-death-every-year-for-our-martini-olives>

Olives have a better flavor if they’re harvested at night, which is bad news
for the birds who tend to sleep in those trees.

Earlier this week, President Donald Trump stood behind a podium in
Hackberry, Louisiana, spitting hyperbolic half-truths about the Green New
Deal, assorted Democrats, and the eternal shittiness of LaGuardia airport
(OK, that was one of the truth-truths). He also spent 30 bewildering seconds
talking about bird cemeteries.

“You want to see a bird cemetery? Go under a windmill sometime,” he said.
“You’ll see the saddest—you got every type of bird. You know, in California
you go to jail for five years if you kill a bald eagle. You go under a
windmill, you see them all over the place. Not a good situation.”
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First, no, I do not want to see a bird cemetery. But if someone does want or
need to see a large quantity of bird carcasses, European olive groves have
them by the millions. According to an absolutely horrifying report from
Nature, every year, more than two million birds are literally sucked out of
trees and killed by the machinery used to harvest olives in Portugal and
Spain.

The olive season stretches from October through January and, unfortunately,
it overlaps with the migration patterns of millions of birds who seek out
the warmer climates in those countries. Olives have a better flavor if
they’re harvested at night when the temperatures are cooler, which is
tragically bad news for the birds who tend to sleep in those trees.

“The machinery is perfectly fine if used during the day, as birds are able
to see and escape while they are operating… However, during the night they
use very strong lights which confuse the birds and lead to their death as
they are ‘sucked in’ by the tractor,” Vanessa Mata, the lead researcher at
Portugal’s Research Center in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources told The
Independent.

The birds affected include several different warblers, thrushes, wagtails,
and finches, as well as the common robin. “It’s a real problem with serious
environmental repercussions that transcend the Andalusian and national
geographical limits, affecting the environmental values of several countries
within the European Union,” the Andalusian Ministry of Environment and
Planning wrote in a report.

The Ministry estimates that more than two million birds are vacuumed to
their deaths every year and, as a result, it is asking for changes to the
harvesting process. (It would also like the machinery operators to stop
illegally selling the dead birds to “rural hotels for consumption as ‘fried
bird.’”)
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In Portugal, the Institute for Nature Conservation and Forests (INCF)
estimates that an average of 6.4 birds are killed in every hectare of olive
groves; those groves cover 15,000 hectares in the country’s Alentejo region.
But—disappointingly—the INCF president has decided that 96,000 dead birds
aren’t “statistically relevant” enough to prohibit nighttime harvesting. He
said that they’ll just count the bird carcasses later this year, and maybe
decide what to do then. ( Nature reports that the other countries with
significant numbers of olive groves, France and Italy, have not released any
data on bird deaths.)
“Numbers of farmland birds in Europe have plummeted by 55 percent over the
last three decades and this is another shocking example of how modern
agricultural practices are impacting our bird populations, including some UK
species passing through the region,” Martin Harper, the director of
conservation for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds told The
Independent.

I’d be willing to trade slightly less flavorful olives for the lives of
several million birds. Because nobody—honestly, NOBODY—wants to see a bird
cemetery.