Friday, April 14, 2006
By TOM VOGT, Columbian staff writer

YACOLT An ambitious group of builders recently took Clark County's construction boom to new heights, something like 30 feet up a power pole.

    And their building actually did figure to go "Boom!" sooner or later, crashing a piece of the local power grid in the process.

    That's why a clan of Quaker parakeets has lost its home.

    The birds had crafted their own version of a condominium by weaving twigs around an electrical transformer on the power pole. More than a dozen of the birds lived in the nest at the corner of Hubbard and Twin Fall streets, while more parakeets inhabited a smaller nest on a power pole about a block away.

    The cables and framework of braces that meet at the big metal canister gave the birds a handy foundation for their nest.

    The parakeets seem to like the hum of the transformer, and the electrical equipment also provided central heating: The transformer kept the temperature in the parakeet paradise a cozy 70 degrees, by one estimate.

    The Quaker parakeets actually small parrots native to South America seemed to be good neighbors, entertaining residents of big-timber country with flashes of tropical yellow and lime green.

    "I put seed out for 'em; all the neighbors do," said Dallas Galbraith, who lives across the street from the power pole.

    But the welcome mat was pulled up along with everything else on Tuesday night, when four bird rescue volunteers and crewmen from Clark Public Utilities dismantled the nests.

    The volunteers from N.W. Bird Rescue and Adoption had hoped to capture the birds before starting the demolition, but nobody was home when the rescuers knocked on the door.

    "At least we got the nest out of there," said Mick Shutt, spokesman for Clark Public Utilities. The nests can get so big that the twigs and sticks will start touching things that aren't supposed to be touched, Shutt said.

    "There are contacts and switches up there," Shutt said. "Nesting material could short out the transformer and cause an outage.

    "These parakeets are a huge problem. Florida Power and Light has had 15,000 nests removed. Anyway, they're just a real nuisance," Shutt said.

    In some parts of the country, officials take a lethal approach to the parakeet problem.

    "Another option is to kill them. We just don't do things that way," Shutt said.

    According to several Yacolt residents, the colony's founding father was left behind when his owner moved out of town a couple of years ago. After several months of bachelorhood, a female showed up, and the two parakeets were joined by para-kids.

    The attention-getting condo project has been a fairly recent development.

    "It was a little bitty nest this spring," Galbraith said Tuesday afternoon. "Now it's a Taj Mahal."

    The structure was getting even bigger as he spoke.

    A couple of parakeets flew in with sprigs they had snipped off a neighbor's lilac bush and added them to the structure.

    An observer at ground level couldn't see the birds, but he could see the ends of the lilac twigs darting around in the air as the parakeets whipped them back and forth.

    "They are weaving them into the nest," said Christopher Driggins, founder of N.W. Bird Rescue.

    Driggins, known as "Birdman," was planning for a busy night as the team targeted the bigger of the two nests.

    A big part of the operation was capturing the birds so they could be relocated. Since the parakeets are not a native species, rescuers can't just play catch-and-release with the birds.

    But N.W. Bird Rescue was lining up people who could give them new homes, and one woman driving through the intersection Tuesday afternoon even pulled over to get her name on the list.

    The volunteers' rescue gear included a 30-foot net to wrap around the structure, and heavy gloves so they could try to pull the birds out of the nest. They had containers for housing the adult Quakers, and incubating equipment for any eggs and chicks they might find.

    "Three first-aid kits," Driggins added. "Two for the birds and one for us."

    Driggins was joined Tuesday night by Bird Rescue members Chris Dahlenburg, Garth Noggle and Brenda Wilson.

    The operation kicked off at 9:32 p.m. when utility workers shut down the power along that stretch of the line.

    Two utility trucks, each with two buckets at the end of its arm, hoisted four men up to the nest and they went to work wrapping the net around the transformer. With no birds to deal with, the rescue operation quickly progressed to a demolition project, and the power pole was nest-free at 10:25 p.m.

    Since it was apparent the birds were watching the whole show from distance, the second nest was a five-minute job. Driggins made sure there were no eggs in the nest, then pulled handfuls of twigs and sticks away from the transformer.

    At 11:20 p.m., the streetlights were back on.

    And the power wasn't all that came back, said Jerry Heldman, who lives on the corner of Hubbard and Twin Falls.

    "On Wednesday, the parakeets were back building a nest," he said.

    Native species threatened by freed pets

    Washington's Department of Fish and Wildlife has a "problem wildlife" program, and the problems can be much bigger than parakeets, said Sean Carrell, program coordinator: "We want to protect our native fish and wildlife populations. People have a fascination with exotic pets, but get tired of them or can't take care of them and set them free. But they're not native for a reason, and their niche is not here.

    "Now wild boars are showing up in the Montesano area. They were brought in for hunting, and they're rooting up the forest floor. Our folks are encouraging people to hunt them, and no license is required and there's no bag limit."