Contractor relocates osprey nest on bridge
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March 15, 2018
Diana Zimmerman
Observers watch as a contractor's crew relocates the osprey nest on the Puget Island bridge. The bridge will be painted, and the nest needed to be moved before the fish hawks returned to lay eggs for the next generation.
Early on Tuesday morning, a crew from Longview's Big C Industries, was on the Puget Island bridge to move the osprey nest. One lane was closed for most of the day and local drivers waited a short time to cross.
When Royal Bridges was awarded the project on March 5 they approached the people at Big C to take on the nest, according to Ethan Winters, who works for Big C.
The project manager, Jake Farrens, didn't have much time, but he designed a temporary beam and platform based on specifications from the Washington State Department of Transportation, which stated that the nest was a little over 3 x 3 feet in size.
Courtesy of WSDOT
The crew discovered that the nest was actually quite a bit bigger than that. And a lot heavier than they had imagined.
"This was new for me," Farrens said. "I've been on several projects. This is a little more delicate. Our motto out in the field is 'Get out of the way, it's not fine china', because we deal with steel all the time. But we were moving a nest. It felt good to do something a little different. It feels good to do good things. It was a fun learning project."
"It was really tough getting the nest," Winters said. "We brought in an operator from NessCampbell to handle the equipment for such a delicate operation."
"Every project has it's difficulties," Winters added, "and we were able to conquer this one in a day."
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