True. About 50.000 birds die due to windmills per year in The Netherlands, so according to this stat we should have 500M birds. So the odds of it killing a specific bird is roughly 50.000/500M=0.01% chance. So we'd expect it to happen once every 10.000 years. Guess we got unlucky last year..

But the statistics can also be deceiving if presented like that, just like you said if people don’t stop and think about which specific birds they kill.

For example let’s say windmills kill 100,000 birds a year and let’s say that is 0.1% of all birds. That looks acceptable. Well 90,000 of those might be seagulls and represent perhaps 1% of seagulls and 9,000 might be eagles representing perhaps 50% of all eagles.

I pulled these numbers out of a hat but all that to say we shouldn’t lump rare birds together with abundant ones.

Except you're not counting the thousand other ways a bird could die in a particularly newsworthy way.

Not that the raw statistic is meaningful either (how many turbines were in the sample region?)

Tough country killing 500m birds/year not to mention all the natural bird deaths