Daily Telegraph

My understanding is that few sea ducks or divers enter offshore windfarm waters because the turbines are alien, threatening installations - like giant scarecrows. It means that they are deprived of feeding habitat.

However, there have been eyewitness accounts of flying eider colliding with blades and, in or two rare cases, surviving.

Some club members carry out boat-based ecological surveys for windfarm companies so they would have first-hand knowledge. One told me, he once saw a waxwing (!) perched on the concrete bases of an offshore turbine

I also have lingering concerns not based on the evidence but on observation. Sea ducks, cormorants and gulls all fly low over the sea so hopefully are out of danger, but I too worry about thrushes and maybe woodcock migrating at night. The high number of woodcock corpses on the beach after the beast from the east may have been simple exhaustion or collisions with turbines; we’ll never know.

Regards Pete.

Thanks for your interest, Pete.

The newspaper has gone off for recycling, but I was responding to an article about redwings in an earlier edition.

My letter was only two or three paragraphs speculating that the species might be one of those vulnerable to collision risk from the increasing number of offshore wind turbines being installed on its migration route across the North Sea.

I have no evidence, of course, but it is just a lingering concern.

We don’t get the Sunday Telegraph so would it be possible to print your article in February’s Heron Jim?

Regards Pete

Sorry, it is The Sunday Telegraph to be precise! All the days are merging into one at the moment!

Congratulations to Jim Wright on getting a letter published in today’s Daily Telegraph . A point well made about the migration of Redwings being threatened by wind turbines in the North Sea.