An osprey knocked out the lights for nearly two hours Monday morning An osprey created quite the flap in Innisfil Monday. InnPower says a bird of prey attempting to build a nest on a key supply circuit around the 6th Line, east of the 20th Sideroad, caused a nearly two-hour hydro outage for around 8,500 customers yesterday morning. “The osprey ended up starting to form a nest,” president and chief executive officer Danny Persaud said. “We have several supply feeders that come in from Barrie and Alliston. It is the top-most supply circuit. The osprey drops branches until it forms a nest. Our crews were patrolling and started to see it hovering above a certain area, dropping branches into the line.” Ospreys are a widespread species in Canada, inhabiting a broad array of habitats with shallow waters, where they hunt for fish. However, they’re also known to use utility poles for nesting. So InnPower has actually built artificial nest platforms at two locations along the 20th Sideroad, in the south end of Innisfil. “We’ve had this before; what we’ve done is we’ve created these platforms to protect the wildlife,” Persaud said. “We’re tracking these very closely in our geographic information system. We map it and identify if this is a common area for the bird and we’ll do our best to put up a platform so they don’t have to build on our line.” InnPower also installs animal guards around major equipment, and they’re piloting decoys on lines, in an effort to prevent this kind of disruption. “We’re a very large service territory — a lot of rural overhead lines,” Persaud said. “For all the reasons we love living here, those are all the reasons that cause outages. We have a lot of trees, a lot of wildlife. We understand how disruptive the outages can be, but we are continuing to invest in the system and strengthening our use of technology and making sure we’re ready for tackling these things and keeping outages as minimal as possible.” Crews had to turn power off to the area to safely remove the branches. Then they did frequent patrols Monday to ensure the bird didn’t resume its activities. “They don’t move it with the bird there,” Persaud said. “The bird is aggressive. When they see us coming up in the bucket, they fly away. But the risk is always there they’ll come back.” InnPower urges residents to be prepared for unexpected outages by keeping a battery-powered flashlight and extra batteries on hand, charging essential devices ahead of incoming weather systems, and updating contact preferences in their hydro account to receive alerts. And during outages, unplug sensitive electronics to avoid surges. Oh, if you’re wondering, the bird is fine. “We don’t touch the bird,” Persaud said. “There’s no harm to the bird.” But the incident comes about two weeks after a major ice storm caused damage and wide-scale outages across the municipality. At its peak, the storm took out hydro to nearly all 23,000 InnPower customers. “This was an unprecedented issue for us and across Ontario,” Persaud said. “We all tried our best. There’s always room for improvement, and we certainly took the feedback from the public. We’re taking steps to make improvements.”