Donald Trump Is a Bird Killer

Trump’s obsession with birds killed by wind turbines is also, like so much else that he complains about, not grounded in fact. Wind power kills very few birds compared to other threats: Turbines are responsible for less than 0.01 percent of human-caused bird deaths, putting them far behind domestic cats and buildings. Many more birds are killed by the fossil fuel industry that Trump tirelessly champions: oil pits, vehicles, fracking, and power lines. Birds fly into fossil fuel infrastructure just as they can fly into wind turbines, but the environmental effects of that industry harm them more: Coal destroys their habitat, while both coal and oil pollute their air. And the biggest threat to birds by far—sorry, Jonathan Franzen—is climate change, which is caused by the fossil fuel industry: The Audubon Society has estimated that two-thirds of American bird species could go extinct if global warming continues unchecked.

Trump sounds pretty insane when babbling about wind power, but he’s smart to talk about birds, because humans love birds. About three in 10 Americans engage in birdwatching, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, whether in their own backyards or—in the case of some 44 million people—on outings a mile or more from their homes. Birding is also a sizable industry, contributing $279 billion to the economy.

Polling shows overwhelming bipartisan support for strengthening enforcement of the Endangered Species Act, rather than weakening it as Trump has done. But even when it comes to specific bird species, we agree that the government should protect them: A Pew survey last year of largely rural residents of 10 Western states found overwhelming, bipartisan support for the Bureau of Land Management’s efforts to protect the habitat of the Western sage-grouse—a flamboyant, and endangered, bird with speckled plumage that looks as if it’s wearing an ermine coat. Ninety-three percent of respondents said it was important, while 41 percent, including a third of Republicans, said it was “very important”; about 60 percent thought the agency’s protections for the sage-grouse weren’t enough, and that the government should do more. All that is notable because in Trump’s first term, he tried to weaken protections for the sage-grouse to allow oil and gas drilling in the bird’s preferred habitat, including on 10 million acres of public land—a move that courts have ruled against. (The Biden administration restored these protections just before Biden left office.)