Wyoming Has a Secret Eagle-Kill Organization

The organization is no secret. It is the Wyoming Golden Eagle Working Group or WY-GOEA-WG, which has a nice little website here.

They even list their 98 present members on their about page, including a lot of federal officials. What is secret is what these folks do. They have a group listserv and recently held their annual meeting, but both are for members only. They appear to have never issued a report on their activities, a study, or even a press release. No hint as to what all these people talk about. My requests for communication were all refused.

As near as I can tell, this group is focused on the business and policy side of wind turbines killing golden eagles, especially in Wyoming. Eagle killing is a big wind business activity in several important ways, and this group looks like a lot of the people involved in those activities.

Members are grouped by the outfit they work for and listed by job title, so presumably they represent their employer. There are 29 feds, or 30%, so this is to a significant degree a federal deal. There are profound eagle-kill policy issues here, so the secrecy is very concerning. This group looks like a Federal Advisory Committee whose deliberations are supposed to be public.

There are three primary wind power business and policy activities that involve the Federal Government and wind turbines killing golden eagles.

First, if a wind farm includes federal land, there will be an environmental assessment (EA) that includes such killing. The EA will be prepared by the agency owning the land, but the developer does a lot of the analytical work.

Second, all wind farms must obtain and operate under a permit to kill eagles under the Eagle Protection Act. These eagle-kill permits are issued by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). Application and operation both involve a lot of work.

Third, in many cases, the wind farm will have to pay a substantial “compensatory mitigation” fee to utilities to try to reduce eagle deaths from electrocution on power lines.

The non-federal members appear to mostly represent consultants who do work in these three areas. There are also several major wind farm developers. That these two groups, which have clear pro-wind financial interests, are secretly engaged with federal officials is very disturbing.