Every morning just before dawn, Diane Theriault turns off the 217, turns on her four ways and bounces up the gravel road to the windmills above Gulliver’s Cove.
The view she says is gorgeous. When there is one. In five months she has only seen five sunrises.
Theriault’s job is to count dead birds on the gravel pads below the 20 windmills up there. She has only seen a few more dead birds than sunrises.
“It’s interesting though,” says Theriault. “I like the time alone to think. And on nice days the view is spectacular.”
Theriault works for the Mersey Tobeatic Research Institute, which is on contract to Nova Scotia Power to carry out carcass monitoring. Another MTRI employee is doing a survey of live birds.
The environmental assessment approval for the project requires Nova Scotia Power to “monitor and report all occurrences of mortality on birds and bats resulting from impact with wind turbines or towers for a period of two years from wind farm commencement.”
So far Theriault hasn’t found many carcasses: nine birds, one bat and one pair of wings since starting in April.
The pad under every turbine is marked with spray paint dots forming a grid with blocks 8’x14’. Theriault walks up and down the grids under each turbine three times a week during migration in the spring and fall, once a week through the summer, and once a month in the winter.
In the summer that means 3 hours of walking a day – she figures she covers close to 6km, looking down all the time.
Her bosses throw out control carcasses – usually food grade quail and black mice – to keep her on her toes and to measure her efficiency. If she misses 10 per cent of the control carcasses, the researchers know they need to inflate her survey numbers by the same factor.
The control carcasses also tell researchers if scavengers are dragging off carcasses before Theriault can find them. Theriault does the surveys early in the morning precisely because songbirds usually migrate at night and so she’s hoping to beat the scavengers to the birds.
When she finds a carcass, she photographs it, takes it coordinates with a GPS. She notes down the grid number and the condition of the carcass as well as species and sex. She seals the carcasses in a baggie and sends them off to the veterinarian school in Charlottetown. Students there perform a necropsy on the carcass to determine the cause of death, to rule out any underlying illnesses and to confirm the species.
If Theriault were to find more than 10 birds on one day, Nova Scotia Power would have to alert the Canadian Wild Service and the Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources.
She has yet to even find a total of ten birds. The fall migration is generally heavier and she’s curious to see those numbers.
“I’m as anxious as anyone to have green power here in Nova Scotia,” says Theriault. “It’s a great plus for the environment, but we also need to know if they are having a negative impact on the environment.”
