When songbirds migrate through the Americas, they often cut through sections of the North Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico to save energy. A new study looks at their flying patterns in an attempt to assess how much risk offshore wind turbines and other marine infrastructure might pose to them. The authors used radar data from U.S. coastal weather stations to find that hundreds of millions of birds migrate over tight windows of time in the Northern Hemisphere spring and fall while flying at slightly lower elevations on average than over land. This puts a proportion of them at risk of being killed by wind turbines, but that risk could be mitigated with dynamic management that takes into account their patterns, according to the study, which was published Sept. 16 in the Journal of Applied Ecology. The Trump administration, in office since January, says it doesn’t support offshore wind development, but the authors still see their work as important to reducing the impacts of these projects on birds. “We hope in the future, if offshore wind begins to materialize over time — I know there’s a bit of a pause on that right now — but even things like oil and gas and offshore flaring, [we’re] hoping that these numbers can be used to provide some guidance in terms of mitigation,” Shannon Curley, a movement ecologist and lead author of the study, told Mongabay. (Curley is an adjunct lecturer at Stony Brook University but undertook this work as part of a…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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