Tourism - for the birds?

Calton is not convinced that windfarms are not major bird mincers, and neither is the goose that lays the golden eggs. Put it this way, although a recent survey shows that numbers of skylarks increase when a windfarm is built, they are majorly bad news for large raptors like sea eagles and so Calton will continue to give them a wide berth. They also cause a decline in the numbers of already threatened curlew and anyone who has heard the haunting call of this magical bird on a summer's evening will know that its loss would be a real tragedy. It is one of the many reasons why people visit Scotland - visitor numbers for 2011 were up on the previous year - and so we should not sacrifice it for the sake of a flawed energy strategy. According to the Scottish Tourism Forum, Scottish tourism is worth £4.2bn every year and employs about 215,000 people. Not peanuts. The SNP are nuts if they endanger this in their short-sighted drive to populate Scotland with windfarms.