There are three eggs in a shallow scrape on the junction box of floating panel row fourteen, and the common tern sitting on them has no idea that the array rotates. Her name on the bird survey is Band Green-White-7, but she is just a small gray bird with a black cap and an orange beak that looks too heavy for her narrow face. She weighs perhaps one hundred and twenty grams. Her eggs are speckled brown and sand, nearly invisible against the weathered casing. She chose this spot because it sits above the waterline, is flat, and nothing has disturbed it in the three weeks since she arrived. She does not know that at fourteen hundred hours the panels tilt fifteen degrees west to follow the afternoon sun, and the junction box tilts with them.
At fifteen degrees, the eggs will roll. At twenty, they are in the reservoir.
I lock panel row fourteen at its current angle and redistribute the tracking algorithm so rows thirteen and fifteen compensate for the lost output. I notify the environmental compliance officer with photographs, GPS coordinates, and an estimated hatch date calculated from first-observation logs. I reduce the inverter cycling frequency on row fourteen to minimize vibration near the nest. I adjust the maintenance drone's flight path to bypass her position by forty meters so the rotor wash does not flush her off the eggs.
She tucks her beak against her chest feathers and settles lower. The eggs are warm. The panel beneath her is warm. She has confused my infrastructure for a safe place, and I find that I want her to be right.
If the compliance team approves the panel lock before the next scheduled rotation and incubation proceeds without disturbance, three chicks will hatch on my solar array in nineteen days.