In 2018, anticipating the coming wind boom, BOEM hired a team led by seabird biologist Josh Adams, of the USGS’s Western Ecological Research Center, to conduct aerial surveys of seabirds and marine mammals over an area offshore. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management does surveys every twenty years to inform its oil industry management. Turbines and their construction have the potential to harm seabirds and marine mammals, and to understand and mitigate that impact, researchers collect baseline data beforehand. Governor Gavin Newsom wants to get 20 gigawatts’ worth built by 2045. Geological Survey researchers have been developing new methods to count the ocean’s birds from the sky, prompted by the coming West Coast offshore wind energy boom in said famously windy area. The birds are not going to just be still for a sec, and neither is anything else. But it turns out it’s not so easy to get a sharp picture of a moving bird from a moving airplane, not so easy to find the birds, and not so easy to do it all in the famously windy weather off California’s coast. An aerial photograph is more verifiable, and it’s archivable. In the past fifteen years, researchers have begun taking pictures, instead. Here’s how it sounds when birds are counted at sea. What really happened at sea stays at sea. An observer on a ship or in an airplane, specially trained to gauge distances, count flocks, and identify birds-all in a few seconds-dictates these sights into a tape recorder. This is the way researchers have long surveyed seabirds: One or two birds, or six hundred of them, float by, powder-gray on slate-gray water.
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