I agree! Over a decade ago I was in California for the first time, driving eastward from San Francisco, up into the mountains to get over into the Central Valley, when I drove into a landscape of hillsides populated by huge white giants, slowly spinning their blades above the golden carpet of grasses at their feet. I thought it was beautiful and quite majestic. I was impressed. There are far worse things that humans have done to the landscape, but both beauty and ugliness are in the eye of the beholder.
Many of us live in cities, and many marvel at the 'beauty' of the skylines there, but most city skylines are just plain ugly if we step back and have a good, critical look. Jagged clumps of irregular, bland colored, blocky rectangles and spires poking up from the ground at the sky. And no wind farm generates any noise anything close to what a city produces! As I said, eye of the beholder!
A friend of mine is an ornithologist who studies bird migration, and a while back he told me that some of the early wind farms were placed in spots that were, unfortunately, right in the middle of some major migration routes (such as areas near mountain passes, certain valleys, etc) (the steady winds work well to help birds move, just as they held propel blades on wind turbines). He said that once they began planning better by adding more focused studies of migration routes into the equation, the issue of killing birds has been addressed and the deaths greatly minimized.
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