Why don’t birds get electric shock when they sit on power lines?

Have you ever looked up and wondered why birds perched on electric lines don’t get a shock? It seems magical, doesn’t it? After all, those lines carry powerful electricity, enough to light up entire neighborhoods! But how can a tiny bird sit there without getting zapped?

For electricity to cause a shock, there needs to be a complete circuit. Think of it like a loop – from the wire, through the bird, and then to the ground. When a bird sits on a single power line, its tiny body isn’t touching anything else. It’s not connected to the ground, another wire, or anything that completes the circuit. So, the electricity happily keeps flowing through the wire, ignoring the feathered friend above. It’s like the water in the pipe simply bypassing a small bump on the side.

The electric potential difference between the two points on the power line, where the bird’s legs touches, is the actual voltage difference that could cause current to flow through the bird’s body. This is different from the potential of the power lines themselves. The resistance of the power line conductor is significantly lower than the resistance between the bird’s legs. This results in negligible voltage drop across the bird’s body, which is why almost no current flows through it.