SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - A resounding "Again?" could most likely be heard throughout Yellowknife Sunday afternoon as the power went out for the third time in about a week.

On Friday, March 18, Yellowknife, Dettah and Behchoko experienced a complete outage from 6:15 to about 7 p.m, according to the Northwest Territories Power Corporation.

On Sunday afternoon, there was a Yellowknife outage, knocking out power for about half of the city at 2:15 p.m. Power was fully restored in just under half-an-hour.

According to power corp, all three outages - one on Sunday, Friday and the previous Saturday, none of which lasted longer than an hour - were caused by ravens making contact with a substation's transformer.

"This is the third bird contact in the Jackfish substation in seven days," stated Mike Bradshaw, spokesperson for Northwest Territories Power Corporation, via e-mail.

"An ultrasonic bird repeller was installed earlier this week, in addition to air cannons and dead bird manikins," he said.

Culling the birds is illegal and no other bird deterrents have been effective this year.

"They're in the wrong spot," said Duane Morgan, manager for Northland Utilities, of the ravens. "I guess they're just moving around right now ... There certainly seems to be a rash of them these days."

Morgan said ultrasonic bird repeller devices emit high frequency noises that ward off pest birds.

"The devices are meant to emit different sounds that would scare birds away. They're meant to imitate their predators ... It makes all kinds of wonderful noises, shrills and bangs and it whistles. It goes off intermittently all day," said Morgan.

He said ATCO, Northland Utilities' parent company, has used a type of ultrasonic bird repeller which has 250 different sounds in a Hay River substation as well as in the Yukon.

"You could program it for the type of bird and try to scare the intruder of your substation primarily."

He said some repellers are motion-activated, turning on and making sound as something moves toward them.

Air cannons, he said, have the same use, and are commonly used at airports.

According to Morgan, dead bird mannequins also act as a deterrent for birds in certain areas.

"They look like the owls and they put them up there so it's alike a decoy to try to scare them off. It's like a scarecrow, the concept of it," he said.

He said other avenues power companies use to fend off animals include sharp prongs around equipment to limit the amount of landing space available and installing insulated rubber on some pieces of equipment.

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