Climate Connections features Sarah Fritts

Bats don’t appear to avoid turbines, and some even face population declines due to wind turbine strikes. A recent Yale Climate Connections radio program shared TWS member Sarah Fritts’ expertise on the best way to deter bats from this type of infrastructure. To keep bats away, researchers have placed devices that emit high frequencies, similar to that of bats’ prey of tiger moths, onto turbine towers. When a tiger moth encounters a bat, it emits high frequencies that jam the bat’s sonar. Fritts, an associate professor at Texas State University, who is testing these bat deterrents in a flight cage, found that these devices can be effective for some species. But the problem is turbines are getting larger, and adding a device to the turbine’s tower may not emit a strong enough signal to keep the bats away. Instead, these high-frequency devices may have a stronger effect when placed on the actual blades of the turbine. Yale Climate Connections interviewed Fritts at The Wildlife Society’s 2024 Annual Conference in Baltimore, Maryland.

Listen to the radio segment here and read an accompanying article on the Yale Climate Connections website.