Monk parakeets nest on city utility poles, causing fires and power failures .

By COREY KILGANNON and JEFFREY E. SINGER

Many of the challenges faced by Consolidated Edison, the New York power company, are well known, blackouts and steam pipe explosions included. But a lesser-known problem has proved no less nagging: how to protect equipment from the thousands of monk parakeets that nest on utility poles.

These birds - also called monk parrots or Quaker parrots ? are not native to New York. They are attracted to the heat given off by the transformers, but t heir nests often wreck the equipment by blocking ventilation. The resulting trapped heat can cause the devices to short-circuit, and often to catch fire, sometimes leading to power failures. In eight fires in the past 18 months, the nests are the main suspects.

Officials with Con Ed, as the utility is known, have tried to shoo the birds with nets, spikes, deterrent sprays and sound machines. “None have been successful,” said Al Williams, a senior scientist with Con Ed who tracks the monk parakeet, a native of South America. One Con Ed crew has come up with its own solution: a plastic battery-powered owl that swivels its head and makes a hooting noise, bought at a local plant nursery.

The idea came from Gerry Goodwin, 65, a 44-year Con Ed veteran who tired of continually replacing a 24,000-volt feeder reclosure on a pole in the borough of Queens. “These things cost about $20,000 to replace, and we’ve gone through five in the past couple years,” Mr. Goodwin said of the reclosures. “These nests are killing us.”

He recalled that a co-worker had installed a plastic owl on his boat to keep sea gulls away. “I figured, ‘If it works for sea gulls, it’ll work for parakeets,’ ” he said. So last year, his crew bought such an owl and named him Hootie.

Hootie worked like a charm. Months went by with no new nests. But suddenly the nests were back, and again they caused the feeder reclosure to shortcircuit and catch fire. Hootie’s batteries must have run out, the workers said, and the birds immediately detected him as a fake.

When Mr. Goodwin took Hootie down, he saw that he had been damaged by the fire. So Mr. Maratto bought another one, along with fresh batteries. On the way, he stopped at a nest-infested device. “Look at that capacitor bank - it’s a condominium,” he said. “It’s engulfed. That’s a piece of Con Ed equipment; you can’t even see it.”

The prevailing theory of how the parakeets came to New Yorks claims they escaped from a cargo terminal at Kennedy International Airport. They settled mostly in Brooklyn and Queens, where there are perhaps 300 nests.

Steve Baldwin, who runs BrooklynParrots. com, which chronicles the wild urban parakeets, said they have strong instincts to return to their original nesting spot and would not be fooled for long by a plastic owl. A better solution, he said, might be to use recorded hawk calls and provide “alternate nest platforms” on poles.

“I know there are people who think Con Edison is killing them, but I think they’re pretty humane about removing the nests,” he said. “It would be nice if, on our Con Ed bills, there was a box you could check to donate $5 for humane monk parakeet nest removal.”