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Crows blackout Moville

Posted Friday, September 21, 2007

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Big Flash

Local resident Kelly McLaughlin was leaving her house in Gulladuff when she saw a huge blue flash.

"It was the brightest light I've ever seen" she said. "I looked over and saw it was coming from the electricty pylon. I wondered if it would knock out the electricity" she said.

Lights Out

Indeed it did for an hour and a half from about 8pm to about 10:30pm on Thursday night.

Supposedly the whole of Inishowen was hit.

Local restaurants had to turn down their customers which affected their business.

Roast Crow

Another local resident, who lives at Gulladuff, said she saw the flash. She immediately thought it was lightning and wanted to bring in her son but she saw a whole heap of crows flying away from the compound where they had been sitting previously.

One local resident said that there must have been a lot of crows to cause that kind of explosion.

Gathering of Crows

It seems that about 300 of them had been gathering there for the last 2 months but that Thursday night was the first time they had been seen inside the compound and on the transformer.

One crow couldn't have caused all that damage.

There would have had to be a load of them massed together.

It seems that they can sit on a live wire without harm as long as they were not earthed.

Big Bang

However, there must have been so many of them in so close proximity that they formed a path from the live wire to the earth. There must have been multiple shortings of the insulators to make that big a bang.

It seems it was like a fireworks display and it lasted about a second and a half.

It was so big a flash that it was seen by boats out in the water of Lough Foyle.

We are reliably informed that they must have been scraping many burnt dead crows off the line the next day.

Saw It All

Local boy Conor Doherty saw the whole thing.

"I saw the crows all sitting on the line and then I saw a big flash of light and the crows all flew away" he said.

They must have had a hell of a fright.

Meanwhile the people of Inishowen sat in the dark for two and a half hours with just their flickering candles for light.

Loss of Business

And local restaurants had to turn away customers which must have led to a loss of business to the tune of tens of thousands of Euros.

They say crows are smart birds.

Let's hope they have had a shock and have learned their lesson about sitting en masse on electric lines and near transformers.

It seems that there wasn't a single crow there on Friday night.