Tag Archives: Birds

News

Obama administration won’t prosecute wind farms for killing thousands of endangered birds

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From Fox News. (H/T Melissa)

Excerpt:

The Obama administration has never fined or prosecuted a wind farm for killing eagles and other protected bird species, shielding the industry from liability and helping keep the scope of the deaths secret, an Associated Press investigation has found.

More than 573,000 birds are killed by the country’s wind farms each year, including 83,000 hunting birds such as hawks, falcons and eagles, according to an estimate published in March in the peer-reviewed Wildlife Society Bulletin.

Each death is federal crime, a charge that the Obama administration has used to prosecute oil companies when birds drown in their waste pits, and power companies when birds are electrocuted by their power lines. No wind energy company has been prosecuted, even those that repeatedly flout the law.

[…]Documents and emails obtained by The Associated Press offer glimpses of the problem: 14 deaths at seven facilities in California, five each in New Mexico and Oregon, one in Washington state and another in Nevada, where an eagle was found with a hole in its neck, exposing the bone.

One of the deadliest places in the country for golden eagles is Wyoming, where federal officials said wind farms had killed more than four dozen golden eagles since 2009, predominantly in the southeastern part of the state. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose the figures. Getting precise figures is impossible because many companies aren’t required to disclose how many birds they kill. And when they do, experts say, the data can be unreliable.

When companies voluntarily report deaths, the Obama administration in many cases refuses to make the information public, saying it belongs to the energy companies or that revealing it would expose trade secrets or implicate ongoing enforcement investigations.

Nearly all the birds being killed are protected under federal environmental laws, which prosecutors have used to generate tens of millions of dollars in fines and settlements from businesses, including oil and gas companies, over the past five years.

“What it boils down to is this: If you electrocute an eagle, that is bad, but if you chop it to pieces, that is OK,” said Tim Eicher, a former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service enforcement agent based in Cody, Wyo.

Most other people like dogs and cats, but I like birds. I am concerned about birds of prey who are endangered species. I believe in conservation. To me, what this story says is that Obama doesn’t really care about the environment. The federal government does have some legitimate functions, like protecting us from threats, maintaining roads and protecting endangered species. But they don’t have to be subsidizing wind power, especially when it causes pain and suffering to innocent birds.

Videos

Friday night movies: rescuing baby birds

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Here’s one with a hummingbird.

Here’s another one:

They’re so cute! I love birds! Making friends with wild birds is the best thing in the world!

The Color of Paradise

This is a movie from Iran. Here’s a review from Christian Answers.

Excerpt:

The story focuses on the life of an 8-year old blind boy, Mohammad (Mohsen Ramezani), who spends the school year in an institute for the blind in Tehran and the summers with his grandmother and sisters in the hills of Iran. His widowed father, Hashem (Hossein Mahjub), is late in picking up Mohammad for summer vacation and even wishes to leave him behind at the school. His aversion to his son is painful to watch. The reason for his attitude becomes apparent when they arrive at the grandmother’s house in the country and Hashem visits the home of the Islamic woman he wishes to marry. He hides the existence of his son from her family, hoping to find favor with them. He has already told his mother he wants to put Mohammad in apprenticeship with a local carpenter, who is also blind. Hashem’s antipathy toward his blind child is his fatal flaw and error, and precipitates the tragic sequence of events that follow.

It’s not overtly Islamic, it’s just really good.

Watch the first few clips and then I will comment. (If you only have time for one clip, watch clip 3)

Clip 1:

Clip 2:

Clip 3:

Clip 4:

You can watch the whole movie on Youtube.

Sometimes people are born with characteristics that they can’t help that cause other people not to care about them. But we should really be seeing other people like God sees them. He doesn’t care about accidental external things. He cares what people are like on the inside.

News

New peer-reviewed article argues for irreducible complexity in birds

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From Evolution News.

Excerpt:

In a peer-reviewed paper titled “Evidence of Design in Bird Feathers and Avian Respiration,” in International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics, Leeds University professor Andy McIntosh argues that two systems vital to bird flight–feathers and the avian respiratory system–exhibit “irreducible complexity.” The paper describes these systems using the exact sort of definitions that Michael Behe uses to describe irreducible complexity:

[F]unctional systems, in order to operate as working machines, must have all the required parts in place in order to be effective. If one part is missing, then the whole system is useless. The inference of design is the most natural step when presented with evidence such as in this paper, that is evidence concerning avian feathers and respiration.

He further notes that many evolutionary authors “look for evidence that true feathers developed first in small non-flying dinosaurs before the advent of flight, possibly as a means of increasing insulation for the warm-blooded species that were emerging.” However, he finds that when it comes to fossil evidence for the evolution of feathers, “[n]one of the fossil evidence shows any evidence of such transitions.”

Regarding the avian respiratory system, McIntosh contends that a functional transition from a purported reptilian respiratory system to the avian design would lead to non-functional intermediate stages. He quotes John Ruben stating, “The earliest stages in the derivation of the avian abdominal air sac system from a diaphragm-ventilating ancestor would have necessitated selection for a diaphragmatic hernia in taxa transitional between theropods and birds. Such a debilitating condition would have immedi¬ately compromised the entire pulmonary ventilatory apparatus and seems unlikely to have been of any selective advantage.” With such unique constraints in mind, McIntosh argues that the “even if one does take the fossil evidence as the record of development, the evidence is in fact much more consistent with an ab initio design position – that the breathing mechanism of birds is in fact the product of intelligent design.”

Let’s take a step back and ask what counts as evidence for (macro) evolution for people who actually care about evidence.

Here’s what counts as evidence:

  1. A smooth sequence of fossils showing the gradual emergence of different body body features across a wide spectrum of body plans. Not just horses and whales, not just micro-evolution. Major changes in body structure, which properly dated fossils, from a wide range of body plans.
  2. A lab experiment that derives a new organ type or body plan from an unmodified organism, like the Lenski experiments tried to do on a smaller scale.
  3. A computer simulation that shows a string of mutations that occur on one organism that would give it a new feature or organ within a reasonable amount of time (less than 4 billion years). The mutations must be probable, and the organism must have improved functionality at each stage of its development. And a calculation would have to be done to show that each beneficial mutation would spread to the rest of the population and survive in the next generation, which is a separate question.

Do we have that evidence in the case of bird evolution (feathers and lungs)? Of course not.

Do we have that evidence in the case of evolution as a whole? Of course not.

People who embrace evolution embrace it on the basis of non-rational, non-evidential factors.