• Question: Why don't birds get electrocuted when they land on electric wires?

    Asked by anon-285357 to Lizzie on 29 Mar 2021.
    • Photo: Lizzie Pendlington

      Lizzie Pendlington answered on 9 Mar 2021:

      Hi 👋 Good question, I know it seems strange that birds can just sit on dangerous power lines! For electricity to shock something, it needs to be able to pass through an object – this is called conduction. As birds are not connected to anything else, like a tree or the ground, the electricity cannot be conducted through them so they are not electrocuted.

Comments

  • Photo: Callum

    Callum commented on :

    Electricity can be thought of as the movement of tiny particles called “electrons”. When we talk about the “flow” of electricity it is actually these electrons that are moving energy through the wires to form a circuit that powers all our appliances.

    This energy will flow from areas of more energy (or “electrical potential”) to areas of less energy. When a bird sits on a wire, there isn’t really a difference in the amount of energy between both their feet as they’re both touching the same wire. As Lizzie said above, it’s easier for the electricity to run through the wire since this is a more direct route between two points and there is no difference in energy between then.

    If the bird was to have one foot on another wire with a lower amount of energy passing through it, then the electricity would want to move through the bird to the lower-energy wire and the bird would get electrocuted! The same thing would happen if the bird (or a person!) touched a wire with one hand and the ground with another: as the ground has no electrical energy, electricity will very strongly want to flow to the ground.

    This is why when people work on power lines they have to be very careful to put something in between them and the ground, like rubber, that electricity finds very hard to move through. Otherwise they can get very badly shocked!

  • Photo: Chris

    Chris commented on :

    I actually saw a YouTube video on this last week, see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtnmCf2QFTc
    ~
    But in a nutshell, since the birds are touching the power line and nothing else, there is no path for the electricity to pass through them. If they touched something else (eg. two different power lines, or a power line and the power pole) then their bodies would create a short circuit between these things, allowing electricity to flow through them and they would get electrocuted 🙁