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It really bugs me to have to admit defeat, particularly to a member of the bird species. In 1981, OPALCO replaced the poles on our transmission lines on Lopez Island. As soon as the new poles were put in, the woodpeckers found new homes. We talked with other utilities, with the BPA and with experts on woodpeckers. A lot of people have tried a lot of things to try to discourage the woodpeckers, but none of it has worked. What we have found out in our research is that woodpeckers like poles for two reasons. The first is territorial, and if a woodpecker feels that a pole is in its territory, there is little that we can do to stop it. The second reason woodpeckers attack poles is that the vibration of the power wires sounds like there are bugs in the pole that the woodpeckers would like to eat. We have tried various devices to change or eliminate the wire vibrations without success. About the only thing that we have not tried is to bolt plastic owls to our cross arms to scare the woodpeckers away. We have tried about everything we can think of to discourage the woodpeckers. We wrapped the poles with rubber sheeting, which slowed the woodpeckers but caused the poles to rot from the trapped water. We put open screening on the poles which the woodpeckers immediately went through. We filled the holes with epoxy, which just caused them to move to a different area on the pole. Over the past sixteen years, woodpecker condominiums have sprouted in many of our poles. Some of these holes go clear through the poles and are two to three feet long inside the pole. The strength that is left in some of these poles is a fraction of what it needs to be. As much as I hate to, I admit it - we have lost the battle. Never fear, technology will always provide an answer to these problems, and this one came from a trip I was on several years ago when I was awakened at an unreasonable hour of the morning by a terrible banging outside my window. When I looked out, there was a woodpecker on an aluminum streetlight pole trying to bore a hole into the pole. The racket that the woodpecker set up attacking this pole was truly phenomenal, as was his endurance. We are going to swap out our woodpecker-damaged poles with galvanized steel poles in groups of three over the next several years, doing about six a year. We are going to send all of our linemen to Lopez to change the poles in the middle of the night. With three large crews working, we can swap out three poles in one four-hour outage. We have scheduled this first outage for the end of June, and we'll let you know the exact date later. When we are done, the score is going to be Woodpeckers 6, OPALCO 1. While they may have won several battles, I expect that we will win the war.
Doug Bechtel
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