The Whimbrel and the Wind Turbines: Capable of Coexistence?

QUINBY, Va.—There’s the whimbrel. It’s a large brown and tan shorebird with long legs and a curved beak it uses to dig into the sand and mud for food.

And there are wind turbines—176 of them to be exact—being built about 27 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach to produce 2.6 gigawatts of electricity.

As the whimbrel flies south for the winter, and humanity seeks the clean energy that could stave off the worst consequences of climate change, researchers in Virginia are seeking to answer a question: Can the whimbrel and turbines in its flight path coexist peacefully?

“We need to know a lot more about how the birds are moving out over that open water,” said Alex Wilke, a coastal scientist with The Nature Conservancy. “How might this additional infrastructure—these offshore wind energy projects—impact them?”

The Nature Conservancy, Dominion Energy and the William and Mary Center for Conservation Biology are working to answer the question by studying the whimbrel’s interaction or avoidance with the utility’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) project, expected to be the largest offshore wind project in the country once it comes online in 2026.

The conservation group has used funding from Dominion Energy, Virginia’s largest utility, for research that found about 42 percent of all whimbrel will fly over the wind energy area designated for the utility’s offshore wind project, and a smaller one further south, off the coast of North Carolina. The new research is finding that, on their north and southbound journeys, a handful of the 31 tracked birds have come into contact with the area within the turbines’ spinning blades.

“Anytime you put a hazard in the airspace that birds use, there’s a chance that birds will fly into it. We see that all the time,” said Bryan Watts, director of the Center for Conservation Biology. “They fly into transmission lines, they fly into towers. Yes, there’s a chance that birds have hit (the turbines).”

The goal of the research is to attain more specific data on the whimbrel’s flight patterns that will help guide policy decisions around future offshore wind projects. Environmental and ratepayer groups see the project as a way to provide massive amounts of electricity cheaply, even as President Donald Trump has moved to block offshore wind projects in Rhode Island and Maryland. 

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has instructed the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to review how wind projects may be harming the bald eagle. Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs have also already increased the CVOW project’s initial $9.8 billion cost by $500 million, and could further increase costs to $11.2 billion-to-$11.3 billion through 2026 if the duties remain.

Despite those challenges, Dominion is continuing with the project, which is intended to satisfy a requirement under the Virginia Clean Economy Act, the state’s decarbonization law, and researchers haven’t recorded any whimbrel deaths thus far.

“Offshore is a lot different than onshore,” said Matt Overton, a biological consultant at Dominion. “It’s really still developing.” 

The Whimbrel 

The whimbrel is among hundreds of millions of birds, from 200 different species, that travel down the Western Atlantic Flyway as part of a migration to the top of the Amazon rainforest in South America. The journey begins at their summer home in the subarctic and arctic regions of Canada and northeastern Alaska. 

A member of the curlew family, the whimbrel will stop on the Delmarva Peninsula as it makes its way south. Many congregate on the southern portions of the peninsula, on the eastern shore of Virginia, in the early fall and again in the spring when they fly back north for summer.

“They’re using our marshes for roosting. Sometimes they’re on the beaches,” said Wilke. “They’re using this kind of mosaic of different habitats out in the system.”

With their elongated and curved beak, the Whimbrel will burrow into marshes and mud flats along shorelines for fiddler crab feedings. The bird will increase their body mass by 50 percent over their period of recharging, Watts said.

“They’re in the air for five or six days without stopping,” said Watts. “The Delmarva Bay is a critical staging area for them.”

The reliance on the land for their livelihood, which is considered to be at a tipping point, emphasizes the importance of maintaining the ecosystem, particularly in the face of climate change, Wilke explained. The Eastern Shore’s barrier islands, including Paramore Island, serve to weaken the Atlantic Ocean’s tide strengths before it reaches the shore and causes erosion and flooding. 

Between the island and the shore are the swaths of marshland that are intertwined with channels that feed the grasses where the whimbrel feed. While the Nature Conservancy has some land into conservation areas to maintain the area’s ecological features, sea level rise is expected to turn about 3,800 acres of beach and dune features and barrier islands into open water by 2080, according to Virginia’s Coastal Resilience Master Plan.

The whimbrel needs protected undisturbed areas, clean water, good prey and good food sources, Wilke said. “If any one thing breaks down or goes away or is really negatively impacted at any one of those points, it can really impact the survival of that species and that bird,” he said. “These staging areas are just so important.”

The Wind Turbines

In a somewhat awkward irony, the whimbrel could benefit from CVOW’s emissions reductions over the long haul but could face more immediate harms from the turbines. 

Government officials had studied the CVOW’s 112,000-acre wind energy area before identifying it as available in 2012. An analysis by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management ultimately found that the areas “would not adversely affect” birds listed under the Endangered Species Act, including the Roseate Tern and the Piping Plover. A further analysis found that another endangered species, the Bermuda petrel or cahow, “may seasonally occur in the vicinity of the Virginia” wind energy area. 

Wilke lauded that the area had been chosen as the site for Dominion’s offshore wind project, in part because of its distance from the shore, away from many birds that fly closer to the coast. If built about 50 miles further east, the turbines would have had to float, which is more costly than driving the monopiles about 100 feet deep and then another 100 feet into the sea floor.

“Dominion has acted as a responsible actor in placing the turbine field where they have. They considered all of the available information on how to minimize bird impacts,” said Watts. “Whenever you place these things, you’re always making some type of compromise. I think they made the best compromises that they could in siting the location.”

Even though “the lease site was set years ago,” Watts said, “that doesn’t mean there aren’t things to be learned so that site placements can be improved … in the future.”

Watts and Wilke had been studying the whimbrel for years, in part because the species uses the Western Atlantic Flyway for both their spring and fall migrations. They are good to track because they’re also big enough to carry trackers, which at first were connected via satellite. Now, the birds are tracked using cell service that is able to monitor their flight patterns more frequently. 

“It’s really quite amazing that you can do that and then sit back at your computer and basically watch where these birds are going and what they’re doing,” said Wilke.

To apply the tags, the researchers used fishing line to make carpet like nets with loops and place them on mudflats the whimbrels frequent. When one stepped into the loop, it became trapped and the researchers emerged from their hidden marsh covering to grab the bird.

“You zip over there because sometimes they can get free. And then you tag them and then let them go,” said Wilke. “Or, in some places, it depends on where we are, they can be really sensitive to the heat. We would actually take them to the boat ramp, which was pretty close, and we’d process them in an air conditioned vehicle to help them not overheat.”

While many of the birds are not flying over the wind energy area, instead staying closer to the shore, another update to the technology now being used is crucial for a measurement, which is called tracking the altitude, or flight height. 

That flight height is used to determine if the whimbrels are flying within what is called the rotor swept zone, which begins at a center point about 482 feet above the average sea level mark. The zone is what is included within the area the blades rotate around, each of which has a 782-foot diameter.

Of the tagged birds, the percentage of whimbrels expected to be exposed to the windfarm’s swept zone on southbound flights is 6.8 percent. For the northbound trips in the spring, research indicates 4.7 percent of whimbrels would be exposed to the windfarm’s sweptzone.

Overton said the turbines have cameras and he was pleasantly “not surprised” that there hadn’t been observed deaths, though Watts acknowledged there may have been deaths among birds that weren’t tracked. 

What’s next is to understand the population of birds using the staging area and how much of a risk comes from placing a certain wind farm in a certain location. If a certain amount of the bird population could be lost, that could inform how much compensation or mitigation needs to occur to make up for potential damages, Watts said. 

Other measures, like painting the turbines a dark color, could make them stand out, though their whitish color is chosen to make them less visible to beachgoers. The turbines are already equipped with blinking lights for aircraft that may be flying in the area.

When the project is complete and all 176 turbines are lined up next to each other, they could act as more of a visual deterrent. 

“We’re going to be in a pause period here for a while, but in the long term, these green energies are going to move forward,” said Watts. “They make the most sense for the planet. Ultimately, I think they’ll make the most sense economically.”

Once various offshore wind projects are up and running, it’s worth continuing the research, Wilke said, to see how any altered flight patterns might affect birds by causing them to expend more energy to fly around the turbines, or not.

“We’ve got these tagged birds in the system that are still collecting data, and they were out there before this project was built, during the project, and hopefully after,” said Wilke. “With the young ones, it’s possible that we could have the chance to see some of the same birds after the project is fully operational, which would be phenomenal.”