You have to wonder if the high point of one osprey’s experience at Tampa Electric’s Skills Training Center is the safe new nesting platform team members created for it.
The platform, erected by a team with the center and the Transmission department, provides an alternative to a nest on top of a power pole – which, in addition to being potentially deadly for birds, can cause power outages for large numbers of customers. In this case, ospreys began to build the nest atop a training tower, meaning that come nesting season later in the year, team members would be unable to use it for training.
Jerry Adams, coordinator of Environmental & Technical Training with Tampa Electric, explained that the new nesting platform is part of an ongoing campaign near and at the Skills Training Center to protect ospreys and power poles from each other.
“Ospreys pick the tallest spots they can find to make their nests, and a lot of times, that ends up being our power poles,” Adams said. “We have attachments and osprey deterrents we can place on our poles, but when those birds are determined to build a nest, you can’t stop them.”
Florida regulations enable TECO to move inactive nests – those without eggs or live young – to safer places. Team members do this often, in fact. On June 4, after a delicate process to remove pieces of the nest from the training structure where the osprey temporarily made its home, they did it again.
“It was a success – they were on it the same day,” Adams said of ospreys that swooped in to check out their new perch. “We hear that 2014 is supposed to be one of the more active osprey mating seasons we’ve seen in some time, so later this year, that nest will have chicks in it.”
But as the team at Skills Training Center envisions it, a safe rescue isn’t the end of the story.
“We’ll use this new pole to train our apprentices on the osprey habitat and on how to safely move nests,” Adams said. “It’s a complicated process and it’s important to do it right. It’s part of being a good steward in the environment and the community while we support reliability for our customers.”
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