Micro Wind Turbines

Hello all,

I live in a rural setting and enjoy all manner of wildlife. My concern at the moment is micro wind turbine planning applications, one is approved, one is at planning stage.

I didn't know about the one already approved.

We have ducks that fly around and at low levels before they come into land, we have house martins zooming around at low level, bats and barn owls too.

Are micro turbines being smaller, lower and rotating faster a concern I can put forward to planning?

We have orphaned ducklings too, 3 of those are nearly ready to fly and we are concerned about those too.

We have taken advice on helping the ducklings from the Seal and Bird Rescue Trust who were happy for us to do it here, here is the story on those,

we already had 3 orphans from another mother run over, then there was...

..Ducky ducky, this is a duck that comes here every year, a right character, she’ll quack like mad at the back door, then when we open the door she flies onto the wall top about a metre away and quacks like mad until she gets some tucker.

She is very friendly and out of all the ducks that come to my garden she is the one we love the most due to her character and will come within a foot of you, how she has survive on her way here and in other countries with her manner how it is, is beyond me.

She’s normally here every day, hadn’t seen her for about 3 days and she appeared with 10 ducklings which were only a few days old if that.

As she was so friendly she would bring her ducklings close to us too, a real privelage, they would walk here from the neighbours property for food and a bath, and they had to cross the B road we are on twice a day, we stopped the traffic whenever we saw she was coming or going, it worked for a while.

Ducky ducky, had all 9 up until end of last week when they were about 2 weeks old, then 3 were run over then, we went out Sunday afternoon and 2 more had been run over when we came back, and the Monday mum and one more were run over, leaving us with 3 more orphans who made it back here on their own which is when we knew it was ducky ducky who had been killed.

We wish we had done something more now, we had put up warning signs, then after the first deaths our Lewis who is 12 put up some with a plea to slow down saying how many had been killed, and then made himself a double sided one on a stick he held up while he escorted them up the road whenever we saw she was off, but it wasn’t enough.

It’s bloody awful really, all those ducklings, and her too, I know she may only be a duck to some, but what a flipping great duck she was, never known anything like her and I doubt we will again.

We buried Ducky Ducky under the apple tree with her ducklings that had been run over too, all very, very sad.

So now we want to make sure ducks do not have extra danger too from micro turbines, and all the other creatures too, as for this flipping road we are on, not a lot we can do about that, I had a letter published in the EDP on Friday about the ducks and how many times our fence and wall has been crashed into, a reporter is coming out on Monday as they want to feature this further and the safer neighbourhood team from the Police are coming out to see what they can do about the drivers around here.