Wind Farm · Post-Construction

Science, Sort of…

I thought this was interesting enough to post here, but since it’s not a hike and Kate wasn’t with me, I’m adding a separate page for it.

Due to client confidentiality, I can’t tell you where this, nor can I share any results, I’ve also moved it to Chile.

This was at a wind farm and it’s called post-construction monitoring. I.e. I was searching for dead birds and bats under wind turbines. The search area is 90 meters radius and the search transects are 6 meters apart and are staked at the middle and ends.

The turbines reside in an organically farmed center-pivot irrigation agricultural area in an arid region of the western United States. Since it’s winter, there were no crops growing, but the fields had contained corn, peas, and potatoes.

As far as biology work goes, this was probably some of the gruntiest grunt work I’ve ever done, kind of a death march. Pretty much any warm body with normal eyesight could do this. However, I call it type 2 fun; not fun now, fun later.

I spent 8 hours walking from stake to stake, turning left, left, right, right, left, left, right, right, left, left, right, right, left, left…