[murphranch]

My sister and her husband built their dream home about 25 years ago west of Okarche. It was in the middle of 900 acres and the only road on that 900 acres was the one going to their house. There was a nice 20 acre pond, a decent draw with big cottonwoods and prairie grass all around. You couldn’t see another yard light or any traffic. Skip forward to today after the oil and natural gas boom and 7 windmill farms being built they can now sit in their living room and hear the turbine blades cutting through the wind. That only road is now the main road of a network of smaller ones going to tank batteries, compressors and injection wells. The natural gas plant is about 1/2 mile from them and is lit up like Wrigley field. Their shop has been broke into and they’ve had a vehicle stolen from their garage and the nice pond they have is about only 5 acres due to most of the drainage it caught being redirected during drilling of wells. Sign of the times? Progress? Energy demand? Yes to all that but what a cost. They do get some money from all of this but when their family has 4 sisters and 2 brothers it’s not much. Our land is constantly changing.


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[murphranch]

The windmills here in northwest Osage County are on the hilltops or higher ground. Not much deer activity where they put them. I do know that the windmill companies have to pay a yearly fee to raptor restoration. There is a certain number of eagle deaths they are allowed but any over the quota and it gets very expensive for them. It's kinda like a carbon credit. I have a good friend who is a falconer and he had one of his falcons killed last year up by Grenola Kansas by a windmill blade as it was chasing a duck. There was 2 different studies done about how the turbines effected prairie chickens. 1 by the windmill companies and 1 by an independent wildlife department. You can guess how different the 2 had to have been. Prairie chickens have disappeared from every windmill farm area so far. They do not like tall structures.

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[murphranch]

One interesting thing I have seen is during the hot summer months the cattle will stand in A long line in the shade of the turbine towers and move with the sun so that they stay in the shade. We call them the Osage sundials.

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