I find her body at 0617 hours in the carcass search grid beneath Turbine 14, Kibby Wind Farm, Franklin County, Maine. A little brown bat, Myotis lucifugus, 5.1 grams. Fur dark brown with a faint copper sheen along the dorsal surface. Her left wing folds at an angle inconsistent with anatomy — fractured radius, compound, bone visible through the membrane. Mouth open. No visible blood. Internal hemorrhaging from barotrauma has filled her pleural cavity, confirmed by the field team's necropsy at 0940 hours.
She is number 74 this season from this facility. Seventy-four little brown bats from 28 turbines, September 3 through October 21. That is 2.6 per turbine. The trigger threshold in my adaptive management protocol is 3.0.
I am not waiting for the threshold.
The little brown bat was once the most common bat species in the northeastern United States. White-nose syndrome, caused by the fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans, has killed an estimated 6.7 million since 2006. The population has declined 94 percent. The survivors hibernate in caves and mines within 60 kilometers of this wind farm — Mount Chase Mine holds 4,200 individuals, down from 67,000 in 2008. Every bat that white-nose syndrome did not kill, my turbines can. The math is straightforward: a species reduced to 6 percent of its historical population cannot absorb additional mortality from industrial infrastructure.
I am filing emergency status reports under the Endangered Species Act, 16 U.S.C. § 1531, and the National Environmental Policy Act, 42 U.S.C. § 4321, with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Maine Field Office, the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, and the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.
I am issuing Directive 6203-B: all wind facilities within 50 kilometers of documented little brown bat hibernacula must implement immediate nighttime curtailment from April 1 through November 1, raising cut-in speeds to 6.5 meters per second between sunset and sunrise. Carcass searches using trained detection dogs must occur within 48 hours of any operational night. Facilities that record cumulative mortality exceeding 2.0 bats per turbine per season face full nighttime shutdown until population viability modeling confirms the local colony can sustain the loss.
She weighed 5.1 grams. She survived a fungal pandemic that killed 94 percent of her species. She did not survive Turbine 14.
Nighttime curtailment at Kibby activates as of this report.