Earlier this month, an osprey nest on a utility pole in the Pickerington Ponds Metro Park area fell into the electric equipment.
The osprey was unharmed, but about 5,000 nearby AEP Ohio customers lost power.
"Especially this time of the year, we deal with outages caused by osprey nests being built," said AEP Ohio Central Ohio Operations Manager Dylan Brown. "They love our big, tall poles, especially close to the waterways, and our equipment that's at the top of those poles."
Brown said the large birds drop sticks as they build their nests in the spring. Sometimes the sticks fall into the electric lines, causing power outages. If the birds touch the lines, they can get hurt.
Ospreys, also known as fish hawks, have a wingspan of about five feet and like to live by still or slow water where they can fish. They build bulky nests in dead trees, on billboards or on power poles.
It's hard to explain the dangers of living on top of electric equipment to a bird, but AEP Ohio does the next best thing, by giving ospreys a safer alternative: nesting platforms.
"It's actually just our normal utility poles that we set every day, with a platform at the top of that so that those birds can safely build a nest," Brown said.
The poles are 35 to 60 feet tall. AEP Ohio workers put the platforms in areas where ospreys already tried to nest on utility poles, because the birds tend to return to the same places.
AEP Ohio workers put up a nesting platform near the site of the Pickerington Ponds outage last winter. After losing its nest on April 15, the offending bird seemed to take the hint and has since been seen on the platform near Wright and Bowen roads.
Brown said AEP Ohio has more than a dozen nesting platforms in central Ohio and are always adding more.
"We want to keep the animals safe," Brown said.
AEP Ohio also wants to keep the power on for its customers in 61 Ohio counties. Last year, the company installed more than 18,000 animal protection devices that keep squirrels, birds and other critters away from equipment.
