Power lines – a call for action!

Abstract

Power lines are well known to be a significant anthropogenic threat to bird populations globally. Research in this field is growing, and there are already masses of data available. Unfortunately, (with some notable exceptions), there is a lot more research than hands on action. Given that we already know the problems, I would like to motivate people to work on making changes, using the already available knowledge, and show some examples of how we are going about making a difference, based on the work done in South Africa and Israel. For the presented cases, we start from looking at finished risk maps and models, and head right into the field with ground truthing, followed by the challenges of working with vs against (using public or legal pressure) electricity utility companies to address threats reactively, but also how we manage to get companies to strategically mitigate proactively, which brings significantly reduced electrocution rates. We then discus the pros and cons of various mitigation methods, touch on pole design (re-design) research and tests in captive environment through to the deployment of re-designed (safe) structures to become the default structure in use. Ideally, other participants could bring examples of their challenges and we shall discuss different approaches towards their solutions (workshop).