{"id":44635,"date":"2026-10-31T07:50:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-31T11:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/?p=44635"},"modified":"2026-10-31T07:50:00","modified_gmt":"2026-10-31T11:50:00","slug":"wind-turbines-beside-shallow-dutch-lake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wind-turbines-beside-shallow-dutch-lake\/44635\/","title":{"rendered":"Wind turbines beside a shallow Dutch lake were ordered to stand still through daylight, twenty of thirty three machines, though only eleven have been cleared to spin again"},"content":{"rendered":"

The nest sits on an island in a shallow lake, and this spring it held two restless chicks<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Beyond the water stands a line of wind turbines.<\/p>\n

Between the nest and the feeding grounds, there is no other way across.<\/p>\n

The chicks would have to fly past the blades<\/strong> to eat.<\/p>\n

Their first outings were shaky and uneven.<\/p>\n

That is when regulators stepped in, and the real question became what a young eagle can actually see when it meets a turbine for the first time.<\/p>\n

A fledgling’s clumsy first flights meet a wall of spinning blades<\/h2>\n

A sea eagle chick does not leave the nest already knowing how to fly. For the first weeks it wobbles, overshoots perches and misjudges gusts the way any young animal misjudges a new skill. A spokesperson for the regional environmental service in Zeeland described the problem plainly: In the beginning, they fly very clumsily.<\/q><\/p>\n

That clumsiness becomes a hazard the moment the nest sits near a flight path crossed by rotors. A pair of white tailed eagles nests on a lake near Bergen op Zoom, and two chicks there were close to fledging when the order came.<\/p>\n

To reach the feeding area nearby, they have to pass 20 wind turbines<\/strong>, and officials judged that risk too great. So the mechanism is not exotic. It is a wide, slow beating bird<\/strong>, one of Europe’s largest raptors, with an undeveloped sense of timing, crossing a gap filled with moving blades at exactly the stage of life when its flying is least reliable.<\/p>\n

Officials stopped the daytime blades near a set of canal locks<\/h2>\n

The wind farm sits near a set of canal locks, close to the border between two Dutch provinces. The trigger was not a hypothetical. The province ordered twenty turbines there to stand still during the day after a sea eagle was killed in April<\/strong> in a collision with a turning blade, and it was at least the second eagle lost to a blade in that area.<\/p>\n

That record pushed several organizations to ask the province to enforce the rules already on the books. The regional environmental service concluded that the wind farm’s owners had not met the duty of care<\/strong> owed to protected animals.<\/p>\n

The restriction explicitly spared nighttime operation, since the turbines can keep running after dark because sea eagles do not fly<\/strong> once the light is gone. Twenty of the site’s 33 turbines were stopped during daylight, the ones standing closest to the breeding area, and the owners were told to install a bird detection system<\/strong> before daytime operation could resume. The affected count has stayed consistent even as other details of the park have been reported slightly differently.<\/p>\n

One tagged bird called WN76, and about thirty breeding pairs<\/h2>\n

The eagle killed in April was not anonymous to the people tracking it. It was a three year old bird<\/strong> known as WN76, the first sea eagle chick born in the area, and its life ended after it struck a turbine blade.<\/p>\n

That single loss set the enforcement process in motion months before this spring’s chicks were ready to leave the nest. The detail matters because the species remains scarce here.<\/p>\n

A forest ranger with a regional conservation group welcomed the measures and noted that sea eagles are extremely rare<\/strong>, with only about thirty breeding pairs in the Netherlands. A single fledgling therefore carries weight a common songbird’s survival would not, which is part of why the response came quickly once two more young birds were about to fly.<\/p>\n

Cameras can spot an eagle coming, and paint got there first<\/h2>\n

A detection system that sees an approaching eagle and pauses the nearest blades is the answer officials pushed toward. Such systems can slow the blades<\/strong> within seconds of a sea eagle coming near.<\/p>\n

The shutdown was imposed for three months, and by early October the regulator reported that additional measures had been fitted at 11 turbines<\/strong>, which now stop automatically when an approaching eagle is detected, according to reporting on the case<\/a>. Those eleven were cleared for daytime service again, leaving nine of the twenty still idle while the light lasts.<\/p>\n

Engineers elsewhere have reached for a similar toolkit, including the wider flight corridors<\/a> tested off the Dutch coast, where radar and tracking keep birds and bats clear of blades. A blunter fix has also been tried: painting one rotor blade black to cut the visual smear a spinning rotor creates, which one Norwegian trial linked to a drop of more than 70 percent<\/strong> in annual bird deaths, though it compared only four treated turbines against four untreated ones.<\/p>\n

A shared coastline still being worked out one flight path at a time<\/h2>\n

None of this casts the turbines or the eagles as villains. The lake, the island nest and the rotors all occupy the same small stretch of coastline because each serves a purpose nobody was willing to move.<\/p>\n

The challenge is timing two very different schedules, a bird’s clumsy adolescence and a turbine’s steady spin, so they stop intersecting. The province is betting that detection, not permanent shutdowns<\/strong>, will eventually let both run without conflict.<\/p>\n

A similar logic has shaped projects elsewhere, including a solar park near Berlin that built twelve wildlife refuges<\/a> rather than simply fencing animals out. For now, the partial daytime quiet near the locks is the compromise, and it buys the next generation of fledglings a little more room to learn how to fly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The nest sits on an island in a shallow lake, and this spring it held two restless chicks. Beyond the water stands a line of wind turbines. Between the nest and the feeding grounds, there is no other way across. The chicks would have to fly past the blades to eat. Their first outings were … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":44641,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_focus_keyword":"wind turbines beside","rank_math_title":"Wind turbines beside a shallow Dutch lake were ordered to stand still through daylight, twenty of thirty three machines, though only eleven have been cleared to spin again","rank_math_description":"Near a shallow Dutch lake, 20 of 33 turbines were stopped through daylight hours after a young sea eagle's first flights put it in the path of spinning bl","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44635"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44635\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44642,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44635\/revisions\/44642"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}