Turn off the lights. The Nesting Ospreys have defeated the Apple Valley Eagles in Minnesota high school football.

They haven’t actually played each other, but the ospreys took charge when they built a huge nest to raise their chicks, high up on a light pole at the Apple Valley High School football field. Because of it, the migratory raptors that are protected under state and federal law forced the school, known as the Eagles, to rearrange their football and soccer schedules, switching to day games instead of night.

Turning on the hot floodlights would have risked cooking the birds and starting a fire.

“When you tell someone this story of ‘Wow, we have to reschedule because there’s an osprey nest in our stadium,’ they’re like, ‘You can’t make this type of stuff up, right?’” said Cory Hanson, athletic director at the school in the Minneapolis suburbs.

Working with the state Department of Natural Resources, the school has been sending up a drone twice a week to monitor the chicks so that once the young ospreys are old enough and fly off, crews can remove the nest and switch on the traditional Friday Night Lights.

“Luckily for Apple Valley, they should be able to remove the nest within probably a week because the birds have already taken some of their first flights,” Heidi Cyr, the department’s nongame wildlife permit coordinator, said Friday.

Hanson said he’s seen as many as four chicks in the drone photos. He said the school became aware of the nest around June.

“When you see these large birds flying across your field with these humongous sticks, you start to ask questions like, ‘What is going on here?’” he said. “And you take one look at that nest, right? And you’re like, ‘OK, this is not your average bird.’”

DNR officials confirmed it was an osprey nest, and told school officials that federal law made it clear that they could not disturb it for now.

So, Hanson said, they had no choice but to revise their schedules. But he said other schools have been great about finding alternate sites and times, despite their initial disbelief.

According to the DNR, ospreys are one of the larger birds of prey that inhabit Minnesota, with wingspans of 4.5 to 6 feet (1.4 to 1.8 meters).

They’ll return to their nests every year and will build them up with new materials every season. Their nests can get as large as 10 feet deep (3 meters) and 3 to 6 feet (1 to 2 meters) in diameter. Their diet is almost exclusively live fish. They’ll dive from high altitudes to grab fish with their sharp talons, plunging as deep as 3 feet (1 meter) underwater.

Ospreys like to build their nests in high places with clear views, including dead old trees and structures that resemble them, like utility poles, channel markers and cellphone towers. That sometimes creates fire hazards. So the DNR issues a number of nest removal permits every year. But permission to remove nests that still hold young ospreys is normally denied unless there’s a major health and human safety concern. Stadium lighting doesn’t qualify, Cyr said.

Efforts to restore their population, which have included building nest platforms, have been a success in Minnesota and elsewhere, Cyr noted. They came off the state’s special concern list in 2015. Depending on the time of year, they can now be found across most of North America.

Once the chicks at Apple Valley fly off for good, Hanson said, school officials and the DNR will relocate the nest from the light tower to a new platform on school grounds in hopes that the parents will return next year. But just to be safe, they’ll also erect deterrents on the lights so the ospreys don’t try to nest there again.

“So if anyone sees that happening, don’t worry,” Cyr said. “The birds are safe. They’ve successfully left the nest and they’re on their way to becoming adults themselves.”

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Associated Press writer Steve Karnowski reported from Minneapolis.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© AP Photo/Mark Vancleave

A retired Michigan autoworker looked at a Facebook message after midnight from a stranger: Did you lose your wallet years ago?

“If so,” a Minnesota man wrote, “it was in the engine bay of a car.”

Richard Guilford couldn’t believe what he was reading on his phone — a decade-old mystery was remarkably solved.

Guilford’s tri-fold leather wallet — stuffed with $15, a driver’s license, work ID, gift cards worth $275 and lottery tickets — had turned up under the hood of a car in a repair shop in Lake Crystal, Minnesota.

A Christmas gift from Guilford’s sons was suddenly a family treasure again. “Big Red,” as he was affectionately known at Ford Motor, was in awe.

“It restores your faith in humanity that people will say, ‘Hey, you lost this, I found this, I’m going to get it back to you,'” Guilford said Thursday.

The wallet was discovered in June by mechanic Chad Volk, sandwiched between the transmission and the air filter box of a 2015 Ford Edge with 151,000 miles on it.

“Crazy,” Volk said.

The filter box wouldn’t snap in place after a repair, he said, “so I messed around a little bit and then pulled it back out and the wallet was sitting on a little ledge where it needed to snap down. I pulled the wallet out and that’s what it was.”

Turn back the calendar to 2014, around Christmas. Guilford was working on the same car at a Ford factory in Wayne, Michigan. It was in a long line of new vehicles assembled elsewhere that needed extra electrical work before being shipped to dealers.

Guilford realized later that his wallet had fallen out of his shirt pocket. He was certain he had lost it in a car, but figured it was on the floor of a Ford Flex, not an Edge, and certainly not in the engine.

Guilford said he searched 30 to 40 cars, and his co-workers looked at dozens more, “just opening the doors up, looking under the seats, looking behind it.”

“I can’t take too much time to look for this because I gotta work. I’m on the clock,” he recalled feeling. “No luck. Life went on.”

Guilford, now 56 and living in Petersburg, Michigan, retired from Ford in 2024 after nearly 35 years. He had put the wallet out of his mind long ago, until getting the message on Facebook, where his profile said he had worked at Ford.

Volk messaged a photo of the wallet and included the driver’s license. “Big Red” saw a younger version of himself with his red-tinged beard.

“The amazing part to me was it was so protected,” Guilford said of the wallet as he also traced the car’s history. “Think about this: 11 years, rain, snow. It was in Minnesota, for crying out loud. It was in Arizona when it was bought. Think about how hot a transmission gets in Arizona driving down the road. That’s incredible.”

Ford spokesperson Said Deep called it a “repair that’s right on the money,” adding: “Can you imagine the odds?”

Cabela’s, an outdoor retailer, said the $250 in gift cards remain valid, but it has offered to give him new cards anyway. Guilford doesn’t know the status of a $25 card from Outback Steakhouse. The numbers on the lottery tickets in the wallet faded long ago.

“I’m going to put everything back in it and leave it just like it is, and it’s gonna sit at the house in the china cabinet and that’s for my kids,” said Guilford, a part-time auctioneer. “They can tell my great-grandkids about it. We’re big into stories. I like tellin’ stories. That’s just who I am.”

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Vancleave reported from Lake Crystal, Minnesota.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© AP Photo/Ryan Sun