If you are one of the residents who couldn’t flip a switch, boil a kettle or tune in your favourite soap opera, Thursday afternoon (Aug. 11), take heart, it was Mother Nature at work.
In all, power was off to 3,300 area residents for about an hour – because ospreys decided to expand their living space from a Fortis-supplied nesting platform to a live power pole near the engine bridge on the Bow River.
In attempting to build a new nest on the Fortis power pole, debris contacted energized components, damaging it. Fortis repair crews moved quickly to re-instate the power supply, but the damage was done, with no birds injured.
The osprey-caused outage is the reason Fortis has been identifying problem areas and supplying nearby nesting poles. Often, said Jennifer Hendricks, senior environmental adviser for Fortis, nesting material is removed from a power pole to a placed nesting pole to entice the big fish-eating raptors to a safer location.
“Each location is site specific,” said Hendricks of the company’s avian protection plan, “and nesting poles shouldn’t be more than about 200 metres away.” Other measures include protective devices on poles designed to stop birds from being electrocuted.
“Fortis engineers have designed a nesting platform that’s the right size and has a perch on it to be placed on wooden nesting poles. There is a reason ospreys choose a certain location, so we pay attention to where they’re placed, and then whether they’re working.
“People really connect with raptors, more so than other birds, and we need the right information to place the poles and keep them safe.”
A lot of the information, said MD of Bighorn Reeve Dene Cooper, comes from enthusiastic birders with BowKan Birders and the Bow Valley Naturalists, who keep close tabs on the ospreys.
Fortis, TransAlta and other companies use the birders’ information, said Cooper, to decide where new nesting platforms will be erected. Between Banff and Seebe, he said, there are about a dozen osprey nests, with about 90 per cent in use this year.
Nests can’t be too far away from a location chosen by the birds, and average about five kilometres between them, said Cooper, for territorial reasons.
“It’s an art and a science,” he said. “Each nest is an experiment in and of itself. When you make a change, there are no guarantees. We’ve had three major interventions; one was unsuccessful and two were amazingly positive.
“Citizens will adopt a nest and watch it very closely. People will call if the birds are two days late returning (from migrating). The birds are very excited when eggs are laid and even more so when hatched, then it’s a real party. Right now, adults are teaching the young to fly.
“People watch them build nests and teach their young to fly. The general public is really connected to the birds and find them really interesting to observe.”
Within the Fortis service area of five million users, said Fortis’ Stan Orlesky, crows or ravens, sometimes an owl or hawk, cause damage to the system. “But only one osprey has been killed in the last 10 years,” he said.
“The power was out for an hour, so it was a big event. Anything affecting 50 users for an hour is considered a big event. Typically, damage to a pole requires three hours work and re-routing to try and return power to an affected area.”
