All that wondering I did last month about why a pair of ospreys would want an orange safety cone in their nest was for naught. It turns out a human put that cone up there. A pair of humans actually.

Ferry County PUD employees Jacob Burbank and Aaron Baldwin nailed the cone in place to keep the osprey nest from spreading onto the insulators—a potentially dangerous situation. If the sticks and branches that the ospreys were adding daily to their nest had created an arc, the nest could easily have caught on fire and spread to the pole. A fire on that particular pole, which houses what is called a double dead-end structure and carries 34,500 volts, would most likely result in a power outage for the entire north end of Ferry County.

Once in a while, a person is lucky enough to spend life doing what he or she loves and calling it work. Ne-Kajira Jannan, former director of the Amaal Dance Ensemble and Theatre and recent transplant to Ferry County, has been teaching, performing, choreographing, and directing dance productions and dinner theatre for over 30 years throughout the Northwest. A Master Class presenter, she’s taught workshops and classes in numerous disciplines, and developed a movement vocabulary and teaching program used by dancers today. Throughout the past three years, she has taught folkdance, folkloric and fusion bellydance classes in Ferry County.