Daily Times

A wind farm in northeastern Brazil sounds like a welcome climate-friendly energy solution, but it is causing controversy over another kind of environmental worry: the impact on the endangered Lear’s macaw.

Home to more than 90 percent of Brazil’s booming wind-power industry, the northeast is known for strong, steady winds that President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva wants to harness to power a green-energy revolution. The region has drawn the interest of French renewable energy company Voltalia, which broke ground last year on a 28-turbine, 100-megawatt wind farm in semi-arid Canudos county, in the state of Bahia. But the project soon came under attack when it emerged that the enormous turbines, with their 120-meter (nearly 400-foot) diameter blades — a known threat to birds in flight — were being built in a nesting region for the Lear’s macaw, a bright blue parrot also known as the indigo macaw, or by its scientific name Anodorhynchus leari.

Named for 19th-century English poet Edward Lear, the birds have dwindled to an estimated population of no more than 2,000 in the wild, as farming and logging have vastly reduced their habitat.The wind farm is “very risky,” said Marlene Reis, of the Lear’s Macaw Gardens Project, an organization trying to save the species.