Impacts of belen wind power plant built in Belen straight on soaring birds

Turkey, as in Palearctic, is one of the most important migration routes. in autumn migration takes place from the Caucasus, as well as from Europe to Africa, and during spring it takes place in the opposite direction. Thousands of migratory birds use narrow passages and hilltops. Belen Pass as one of them, is located in Hatay. Belen is a bottleneck for birds where wind power plants (WPPS) are built since 2010. in this study, we have evaluated the impacts on soaring birds under four concepts as " Habitat Loss ", "Disturbance", "Barrier Effect" and "Death by Collision ". Results show that, birdswhich use the site in long terms decreased in numbers between 2010 and 2012, it was also observed that they had stayed away from the turbines. However, this situation changed in 2013 as the numbers began to incline again. Since Belen WPP was built on a regularly used migration route, most of these migratory birds began to change their micro routes within the area due to barrier effect of the WPP. However, during our study other WPPs built around our research area also decreased th numbers of migratory birds and also pushed them again onto Belen WPP. Though, there were scores of birds passin through the WPP no deaths were occurred depite the hard searches for carcasses.