Along with polar bears in ice floes drifting out to sea, a favorite image of the greenies is oil-soaked birds, flung before us every time there is an oil spill, even one so minor that the media expresses it in gallons, not barrels of oil in order to make it seem large-scale.  The recent pipeline spill at Refugio State beach in California sounded much worse as 100,000 gallons than 2,380 barrels.  And pictures of oil-soaked birds were ubiquitous.

Why, you’d think that getting our power from oil is the worst thing that could happen to our avian friends.  But Kerry Jackson, writing at Investor’s Business Daily, brings some important perspective to energy choices and bird survival. It turns our that greenies have a lot of bird blood on their hands:

In latest U.S. oil spill off the coast of California, 161 birds died, as of the most recent count.

Now, compare this toll to the damage wrought by wind and solar power.

Estimates for bird deaths by wind turbine run from 100,000 a year (the National Research Council) to 300,000 (American Bird Conservancy). Bloomberg News puts the toll at 573,000 birds in 2012. At the high end of the estimates, that's well more than 1,000 birds chopped to death each day.

Meanwhile, as many as 28,000 birds are killed each year — that's one every two minutes — by the Ivanpah solar plant in the Mojave Desert, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Ivanpah focuses more than 300,000 mirrors on three 459-foot towers, generating heat of up to 800 degrees — enough to fry birds that happen to fly by.

To be fair, the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico did do substantial damage to fowl in the region. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reports that 2,303 "visibly oiled" dead birds were collected "within the Deepwater Horizon/BP incident impact area."

But oil spills the size of the BP accident don't happen every year. Deaths caused by wind turbines and solar farms, however, don't stop. The Daily Caller reports that "in the time since the 2010 BP oil spill, some 2.9 million birds have been killed by wind turbines."

In fact, writing on these pages, Norman Rogers has chronicled and photographed the horrific toll on birds burned alive mid-air by the Ivanpah solar energy plant.

In addition to being heavily subsidized, that plant is producing only 40% of its expected power output.

But in the green propaganda media – which includes almost every major media outlet – the only bird lives that matter are those few who fall victim to oil spills.  But all #birdlivesmatter, don’t they?