By Ethan Forman
DANVERS — A red-tailed hawk escaped the electric chair while wreaking havoc with the town's electric system in the area of Route 114 earlier this month.
"The bird is pretty lucky," said veterinarian Dr. George Myers, owner of Danvers Animal Hospital, which is caring for the hawk as it recovers from its brush with the town's power grid.
The singed bird not only survived, it managed to knock out power in the area for 11รขÑ2 hours on July 9 after it brushed a piece of equipment meant to protect a power line from a lightning strike. The bird was found, not moving, just below the pole where it was zapped at the Hylands substation behind Walmart, said Coleen O'Brien-Pitts, the electric utility director.
The outage also caused damage to overhead and underground equipment feeding the substation.
After a few hours, the bird was able to move, and Danvers Electric's John Whalen, the technical services supervisor, got some fresh fish to feed it. Public Health Director Peter Mirandi called animal control officials to bring the bird to the animal hospital.
The hawk now lives in a cinder block enclosure in a barn at the animal hospital on Route 62. Its feathers need to moult and grow back so it can fly and be released back into the wild.
"I haven't seen this electrical injury before," Myers said. "I guess it is usually pretty fatal in most situations."
When visitors looked in on the bird yesterday, it instinctively spread its wings to scare away predators. Myers said the injured left wing looks like "dead branches on a tree." Myers said the feathers should grow back.
"There's a point where the electricity comes in and where the electricity comes out," Myers said, meaning the left wing may have been the exit point for the current.
"He's doing superbly," Myers said. He's eating well and is aggressive toward visitors, a sign he is recovering. He may later be transferred to a wildlife clinic run by Tufts or to a person in Byfield who can care for him.
The red-tailed hawk is the most common type of hawk in North America, and it can often be seen perching on utility poles looking for prey, according to various Web sites.
The wetland area off the Bow Street neighborhood down to Route 114 has seen more birds nesting in the electric right of way, causing outages.
"In the last couple of months, it has increased exponentially," O'Brien-Pitts said.
The 115 kilovolt lines for National Grid run through there, and so do the town's electric lines, which carry power at a stepped-down voltage of 23 kilovolts. The area feeds the Danvers Industrial Park and Beverly Hospital at Danvers' outpatient medical center. These areas have been hit with outages, despite the increase in the system's reliability over the past decade.
"We hate any time there is a blink," O'Brien-Pitts said.
The hawk's wingspan of 3 to 5 feet means it can touch a positive wire and a neutral wire at once, causing a fault, O'Brien-Pitts said.
The town normally uses animal guards and specially clustered lines to keep critters away, but the area is inaccessible to power crews and their trucks, O'Brien-Pitts said. It may be better to reroute the line, rather than switching out the wires, and the division is doing a cost-benefit analysis to see which project makes sense.
Staff writer Ethan Forman can be reached at 978-338-2673 or eforman@salemnews.com.
