Many birds often perch on power lines, but none of them are electrocuted, burned, or harmed. The program Now or Never, broadcast by La 1, explained the reason in a simple way in one of its deliveries.
These types of cables are used to transport large amounts of energy over long distances and in a very short time, so that electricity goes from power plants to homes, for example, quickly. To do this, a line must have a large voltage difference between two points. High voltage cables support voltages between 120,000 and 380,000 volts. Electric current circulates inside these cables in the form of electrons, which move between two points with different potentials.
Electrons always look for the easiest way to move, that is, they prefer to move through materials that are good conductors and that offer low resistance to their path. One of them is the copper with which cables are usually made. When a bird touches a wire, the electricity does not affect it because its small body is not as good a conductor as the said metal and because its two legs have the same potential. Therefore, electricity continues to flow through the high voltage line.
The situation would be different if a bird was able to put one foot on a wire and the other on the ground. This would cause each leg to have a different potential, with which the electrons would choose to circulate through the body of the animal, which would be electrocuted. The same thing would happen if the bird could touch two different wires at the same time. However, high voltage power line poles are designed in such a way that the cables are placed at a great distance from each other.
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