Every time we use electricity from the national power grid, we are complicit in the death of thousands of birds. The power lines that criss-cross our country, and the rest of the world, are death traps for many bird species. Electrocution is one hazard, but a more vexing problem is collision when an unsuspecting bird meets a horizontal wire directly in its line of flight. The deadly impact of these large, ubiquitous structures on birds has been recognised for many decades now, yet it remains a particularly difficult problem to solve. The demand for electricity is accelerating in our technological world, which will exact an increasingly heavy toll on the birds that share the airspace occupied by transmission lines. We cannot halt society’s energy demands, but nor can we ignore the plight of so many birds. How do we resolve this terrible conundrum?