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.

Luckily, Jacob Burbank noticed the osprey’s nest-building activities on his way to and from work. He notified crew foreman Rick Kincaid who had the sticks removed, hoping the pair would move their nest to a better location. But ospreys are persistent and they started rebuilding their nest on the exact same spot. This meant the crew had to move on to Plan B.

Kincaid had Burbank and Baldwin go up to the nest once again, this time with the cone. Using a bucket truck, they strategically placed the cone to keep the growing pile of nest materials away from the insulators. The PUD has experience with this sort of thing and Kincaid told me they took this osprey nest very seriously. “We had to stay on top of things,” he said. “Once the birds actually build the nest, we can’t legally mess with it.”

Ferry County PUD crews have used safety cones on several other osprey and bald eagle nests over the years, and have even built platforms alongside power poles to encourage nesting activity there instead of on the poles. The Keller area has several successful platform nests that the PUD worked to establish.

It always warms my heart when I hear of humans going out of their way to help wildlife thrive in the world we claim as our own. The crew at the PUD had the safety and uninterrupted service of utility customers in mind as they dealt with the nest, but they also did what they could to give the osprey pair a chance at building a nest and raising their young.

When I asked Rick how the cone was working, and whether or not he felt the situation up there was safe, he assured me that all is well. He and Jacob check it every day when they drive by. While their gaze is from a safety angle, they, like the rest of us, will undoubtedly be looking for the osprey chicks that will hopefully be hatching out later this month. I wonder what those fluffy newborns will think of that big orange plastic cone?