In this case, it means lots of things – like the fact that we care about all the residents in this place we love and call home. We care about your safety and we care about the safety of feathered friends like the osprey that share the communities we serve. It means we care about ensuring the power you pay for is there when you need it. We’ll come back to that point.
It means an osprey, as you can see in the screen capture above, has a nice, well-furnished home atop a non-energized power pole at Tampa Electric’s Skills Training Center near 78th Street. We placed a camera above the nest to give you a glimpse of the osprey’s day-to-day life as she nurtures her young. (The osprey cam may not work on all web browsers, which may come as a relief to the osprey.)
Birds like the osprey and the bald eagle love to build homes on structures like power poles because they provide ideal perches to spot food and stay safe. But this is a problem because coming in contact with electrical equipment is a death sentence, typically, for the birds (and humans should keep their distance too). Additionally, a situation like this can lead to a large number of power outages for customers like you, since natural occurrences like this account for more than half of all outages.
For those important reasons, TECO team members regularly and carefully relocate bird nests atop our power poles to safe ones like the one you can see in the osprey cam. We also install structures atop existing power poles to discourage nest-building. If you see a nest atop what appears to be a power line-connected TECO pole, let us know! (And never try to take action yourself.)
And as our commitment to environmental stewardship goes beyond that at places like Tampa Electric’s Manatee Viewing Center, we protect reliability for you in other ways through woodpecker-proof poles we place in areas where these other feathered friends of ours are known to thrive. (Who’s laughing now, woodpeckers? There are plenty other wood sources to peck!)
As for the osprey now starring in a lead or supporting role in our osprey cam? We considered a contest of some kind to encourage people to guess on social media when the egg would hatch. We considered a contest to name the bird. We considered a contest to name the contest. Feel free to share any suggestions as a comment below.
In the meantime, we’ll continue to do what we do, working around the clock to make sure you have the safe, reliable power that we’re proud to provide. And as we look to other sources of power, like the sun, we can imagine a world that’s better for everyone. Just as this osprey is thinking of her future, we’re thinking about the one we share with you – working nonstop again, in fact, to make it a better one for everyone who calls the Tampa Bay area home.
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