Bird mortality from cats is 10,000 times windmills. 10,000 times. It's really hard to state just how much bigger that is.
An even bigger cause of decline is birds that are never born due to habitat loss and pesticide use that fundamentally disrupts their food chain because no insects = no birds.
Windmill bird mortality is some extreme, irrelevant outlier that does not matter at all. It's a manufactured issue that follows a formula discussed by Albert Hirschman in his 1991, "The rhetoric of reaction". Specifically it uses the framework of the perversity thesis:
“any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order only serves to exacerbate the condition one wishes to remedy.”
This is used as a scripted template to smuggle agendas through "think tanks" (which is a polite term for "propaganda factories") and then onto some theatrical "they aren't telling you this on mainstream media" sphere where they are peddled as "talking points" and "facts".
In this case, as in most, they load it up with common logical and rhetorical fallacies. The go-to here is to represent the extreme statistically insignificant outlier as if it's the normal and then advocate for policy focusing around the outlier.
It's not about the outlier, in this case birds. Instead, it's about whoever paid the think-tanks to use the classic Hirschman tools and push the narrative through the channels. Most of the think tanks are funded by oil and gas so ...
If we focus on the other 99.99% of the deaths and the other 100% of the non-death declines then the problems will actually be addressed instead of say, firing up coal fire power plants, drilling for oil, decommissioning wind farms and having it have zero effect on the downward trend.
It might be hard to figure out why publicly traded oil and gas companies would feel fiscally obligated to invest in campaigns to increase their market share, but I'm sure we can connect the dots.
Unless you honestly think they are abandoning their fiduciary duty, are squandering company money because they're all a bunch of rabid birders, and just happened to read the numbers wrong. I mean sure, ok.
That's the most substantive response yet, let's source it and drill down solutions for each.
Windmills are the most recent change I can think of to explain this trend.
Cats, cars, and pollution have been killing birds, but maybe it's ramped up.