Dancing starling spectacle caused power cuts in Scottish village (2020)

Dancing starling spectacle caused power cuts in Scottish village (2020)(bbc.com)

42 points by lobbly 4 years ago | 21 comments

Angostura 4 years ago |

> He said the firm would work with RSPB Scotland to find ways to discourage the birds from the power lines.

Or just maybe install some plastic spacing rods in the effected stretch to prevent the wires clashing.

bayindirh 4 years ago | |

> Install some plastic spacing rods in the effected stretch...

No! Nature is the enemy! We can't let birds around the cables. They're fake anyway! /s.

floyd_b 4 years ago | |

How would these work?

lukeplato 4 years ago |

Worth pointing out the irony in terms of self-organized criticality [0], which describes the activity of starlings flocking together in terms of dynamical systems and is also used in self-organized criticality control [1] which has been applied to power grids to prevent power outages (from cascades of load shedding).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organized_criticality [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organized_criticality_con...

AlexandrB 4 years ago |

I absolutely adore starlings. I used to work across from a wild meadow. In the fall starlings would gorge on some kind of berries from the meadow and then sit on the power lines on my side of the street. The result: a several hundred meter long line of pink bird poop on the sidewalk.

What always amazed me is how their takeoffs and landings seem synchronized. One second they're sitting on the power line chattering at each other - creating a great racket - and then suddenly everything goes quiet and they all take off together.

filoeleven 4 years ago | |

I hate starlings.

I am in the US. Some prick decided to bring about 100 of them to Central Park NYC in 1890 because he liked Shakespeare, and Shakespeare mentioned them a few times in his plays.

They are an invasive species in the US, and that’s a problem. They are also horrifically screechy, which is where my hatred comes from. I’ve heard them sing some quite pleasant songs now and then—is this what they do more in their natural habitat? In my city, they mostly scream aggressively all day.

I have never hunted animals, but if I knew how to legally kill starlings in my city, I would start tomorrow.

henearkr 4 years ago |

Well, there seems to be no trees there, so the starlings are sitting on the power lines because no choice.

smcl 4 years ago | |

There aren't any trees in that particular field, but Airth isn't exactly in a barren treeless wasteland - there are pockets of woodland around the village: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Airth,+Falkirk,+UK/@56.067...

henearkr 4 years ago | | |

Right, fair enough, but if there were trees regularly everywhere, there would be no huge tree-less (but powerline-ful) area, and between a weird chair-powerline and a nice chair-tree, I guess the choice is easy for a bird.

I mean, if there were _neither_ any power lines, the starlings would certainly sit a bit further, but there _are_ powerlines (i.e. chairs), so here they are.

(did you notice, I'm trying to think bird)

quickthrower2 4 years ago |

Why is there a powercut? Because there was a tweet-storm.

lbriner 4 years ago |

What makes me slightly angry is the supplier saying they don't know what is causing it when all they had to do was go there and look!

That is my biggest gripe with corporates and bureaucracies, they talk a lot when a simple bit of action would nip something in the bud! We have become feaful people who would rather write an email than call somebody or go and see them in-person.

Someone 4 years ago | |

Go where? Chances are there’s quite a few km of power lines in sometimes badly reachable places to inspect.

Also, given that the interruptions were intermittent, it wouldn’t just be a matter of checking the power lines once.

I also don’t rule out they have fairly good stats on causes of intermittent short power interruptions, and looked at more likely causes first.

I don’t think there is enough info in this article to put blame this way.

TheFattestNinja 4 years ago | | |

It's true it might be inaccessible and that they have telemetry. But if the issue is recurring and you find no solution in the data you gotta walk the line. In fact this time it was the solution but ill grant you its an unlikely event. So you are both right? In medicine you always ALWAYS perform visual inspection of the site no matter how sure you are.