Brad Bussard and his team are accustomed to working almost invisibly. As a district line supervisor with Lancaster-based South Central Power Company, Bussard and the lineworkers he supervises often do their jobs — maintaining the electric lines that bring power to members’ homes and businesses — almost in the background of everyone’s daily life.
But on this day, they had a rapt audience, and he completely understood why.
Relocating an osprey nest typically takes about four lineworkers, a bucket truck or two, some ingenuity, and more than a little bit of patience.
It was the end of May, the time of year when ospreys return to Ohio from their winter home in Mexico, and a breeding pair had decided that one of the utility poles in the training yard next to the co-op’s office was a good spot to build a nest. The population of ospreys, once nearly wiped out in the Buckeye State, has been steadily growing here since the Ohio Department of Natural Resources reintroduced them in 1996, to the point where the Division of Wildlife no longer even bothers to count them. The downside to that environmental success story, however, is that Bussard has been relocating nests from co-op poles for nearly two decades.
Now, when most people think of power outages, they picture storms and downed trees — not ospreys. But Bussard, for one, knows that these feathered friends, which often grow as large as bald eagles, and their 6-foot nests (also called “aeries”) could pose just as much risk to the grid as severe weather. “Fortunately, the lines in the training yard aren’t electrified,” Bussard says, “so in this situation, it wasn’t going to cause an outage and there was no immediate danger to the birds.”
Instead, this particular nest was an opportunity to give some of the younger guys experience with an increasingly common duty that doesn’t typically come up during lineworker training.
Relocating an osprey nest isn’t as simple as just picking it up and putting it down somewhere else. It’s a process that typically takes about four lineworkers, a bucket truck or two, some ingenuity, and more than a little bit of patience. Timing, however, is key.
“The biggest thing is catching it early enough, when it’s still being built, so we can make it easier on the birds and decrease the window for potential outages,” Bussard says.
The first step to moving a nest is to get permission. Since ospreys are protected by the federal Migratory Bird Act, it’s illegal to capture the birds or move their nests without a permit. Next is to find a place to set a new pole that’s acceptable to the fish-eating birds. South Central’s resident ospreys feed from several stormwater retention ponds near the co-op’s office in the Rock Mill Industrial Park. “We try to get them a better vantage point for hunting and fishing,” says Zac Reed, South Central’s director of engineering. “Can we get it to a higher elevation? Can we get them a more unobstructed view? Can we get it reasonably far away from our facilities? Those are things we look for.”
Once a proper spot is chosen and a new pole set, only then do lineworkers go up in buckets and actually move the nest. They carefully dislodge it from the (de-energized) lines and maneuver it onto a pallet to move it to its new location. Since ordinary pallets tend to rot away after a time, the engineering team came up with a safer and more permanent platform. “We’re using our treated crossarms and we build basically a little grid system up there,” Bussard says. “Then, we take some of our old scrap wire and put it up there to help lock their nest in place.”
The process typically takes only five to seven days from the time a nest is spotted in a dangerous location until it gets moved. And through it all, that rapt(or) audience pays particular attention. “We’ve never had an incident where they’ve actually come down and tried to attack or anything,” Bussard says. “They’ll patrol around, land on an adjacent structure for a while, and then they’ll patrol some more. They’re just constantly watching.”
