EVDS Alumnus Simple Strategies Reducing Bird Deaths and Power Outages

It was treeplanting that triggered environmentalist Nikki Heck’s epiphany: working in industry was the best way to make a difference.

“I got frustrated being the person putting the trees in the ground,” says Heck, 33, an environmental adviser with the electric utility company AltaLink. “I wanted to be the person making the decision about how the land was managed in the first place.”

The Calgarian was an aspiring biologist when she treeplanted during her university years. The job paid her tuition and opened her eyes.

“I knew I didn’t want to be the peon; I wanted to be making the decisions up front,” she says.

In 2004, while studying for a master’s degree in environmental design at the University of Calgary, Heck began working at AltaLink, Alberta’s main electricity transmission provider. She was still new to the job when a public report arrived about birds colliding with transmission lines near Edmonton.

Heck was sent out to investigate. “What I found was, when a bird collides with a transmission line, there’s no (power) outage, so the company doesn’t even know it happened,” she explains.

She began to research, and discovered that the impact of electricity infrastructure on birds was quite significant and virtually unknown to the Canadian electricity industry. “I was blown away by the scale of the issue.”

Collisions with the lines is a big issue, especially for water birds (ducks, geese, swans, herons and cranes); their large bodies make it difficult for them to manoeuver quickly enough to avoid an obstacle in time. There is also a risk of electrocution, for example on smaller distribution power poles where wires are close together. Birds (mostly raptors: hawks, eagles, owls) that perch on a pole can be electrocuted, usually when taking off or landing. Birds who nest on structures can also be electrocuted, though the risk is much smaller.

Heck set about creating Canada’s first Avian Protection Plan, a management system to mitigate the impact of power lines on birds. “We don’t try to keep them off,” she explains. “We try to make our facilities avian-safe.”

The plan includes numerous bird-friendly procedures and mitigations that AltaLink has implemented. To reduce bird collisions with power lines, the company installed reflective markers on lines in high-risk areas. The markers have colour patches that reflect light in the UV and colour spectrum, which makes the lines more visible to birds so they can react more quickly to avoid a collision. So far, about one third of AltaLink’s high-risk sites have been outfitted with the markers. Sites for new lines are assessed for collision risk (proximity to a wetland, for example) and are either avoided or outfitted with markers during construction.

It is not known exactly how many birds are killed annually by electricity infrastructure. A 2005 extrapolation study suggested a mortality rate of 130 million birds per year in the United States, but Heck thinks the number may be high.

Click here for the full article by Elizabeth Withey in the Edmonton Journal.