For utility workers, saving osprey, wildlife part of the job

An A&N Electric Cooperative serviceman recently received a call about a transformer that had ignited during a storm.

Virgil Wessells didn’t just have to fix the transformer and restore power to local homes, however.

He also had to navigate through an osprey nest built on the wooden pole.

“We try to take care of the animals,” said Peter Zach, the ANEC serviceman who helped Wessells re-fuse the transformer and rescue a baby osprey displaced by the fire.

Those rescues come up more often than most people think, Zach said.

Working at ANEC, he has seen eagles, hawks, raccoons, snakes and squirrels interfere with electrical operations. One coworker even rescued a cat that had been shocked and kept him as his own pet, Zach said.

“We don’t like really seeing any animal hurt, but we’ve seen a lot of them that do get burnt,” he said.

To help curb these wildlife injuries, ANEC takes measures to keep wild animals off the poles and away from live wires.

Anyone who’s noticed PVC pipes arranged like Christmas trees atop utility poles has seen their handiwork.

“They’re really flimsy, so the fish hawks can’t get on it. They just slide off,” Zach said.

That’s important because birds like osprey are the main culprits that interfere with electrical operations. 

ANEC puts out bright orange cones and “a little of everything else” to prevent the birds from building nests on poles, which helps avert power outages, too, Zach said.

If workers see osprey building a nest on a pole, they put a taller, isolated pole beside it to encourage them to settle there instead, he added.

Sometimes, the birds still construct a nest on live poles, though.

In the case of the Vaucluse Shores fire, in Machipongo, osprey still constructed a large nest among the transformers.

At 5 feet wide and made of sticks, bark and grass, the nests are ready-made fuel when a fire breaks out.

“We try to do as minimal damage to the nest as possible when trying to re-fuse those,” said Jay Diem, communication specialist at ANEC, “but sometimes, they’re just too damaged to do anything with.”

At the Vaucluse site, half of the nest caught fire, causing the entire structure to fall to the ground with a baby osprey in it, Zach said.

“When I got down off of the bucket, I’d seen the wood and limbs in the ditch, and something move,” he said. “That’s when I’d seen an osprey there.”

With the young bird’s parents still nearby, Zach thought the bird would be OK. But returning the nest the next day, he found the juvenile in the same spot.

He called his neighbor Kathy Cummings, of the Eastern Shore Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, who said the osprey was unlikely to survive on its own.

Zach scooped the small bird up in his jacket, put it in a box and delivered it to Shore Wildlife Rehab.

Cummings, a licensed wildlife rehabilitator, said the osprey arrived in good health, but wasn’t old enough yet to fly. 

Because osprey only have one or two young at a time, it would’ve been the only baby in the nest, she added.

Cummings said ANEC workers have delivered injured animals to her many times through the years.

“I can always count on them to help wildlife out when they come into contact with it,” she said.

”I think that’s really great that they go above and beyond to help the wildlife,” Cummings added.

As for the young osprey, she moved it to a rehabilitation center in Virginia Beach, where it joined seven other juvenile osprey and is learning to fish and fly.