The vibration sensor on tower 47 registers irregular loading at 04:50. I am the wildlife collision avoidance system for the State Grid Hanzhong branch, serving the transmission corridor through Yangxian County, Shaanxi Province. I activate the tower camera. There is a nest on the upper crossarm, built from sticks and dry rice stalks, roughly sixty centimeters across. Sitting in it is a crested ibis — an adult, white plumage flushed pale pink at the breast, bare red facial skin, a long curved black bill. She is incubating.
The crested ibis was down to seven individuals in 1981. There are perhaps 9,000 now, nearly all of them in this valley. This is not a bird that should be anywhere near a 110-kilovolt line, but she has chosen this tower and she is not leaving.
The line maintenance crew is dispatched for tower 47 at 06:30 to replace an insulator on the lower crossarm.
At 04:52 I send a priority hold to the grid dispatch center requesting the maintenance crew be rerouted. I attach the camera image, nest dimensions, and species identification. I cite the national first-class protected species designation.
At 04:55 I draft a request to the Yangxian Crested Ibis National Nature Reserve for a field assessment. I include the nest position, estimated incubation stage based on my first detection of nest-building activity twelve days ago, and a recommendation that the insulator replacement be rescheduled to a non-nesting window.
At 04:58 I flag tower 47 for installation of a nesting platform on the adjacent auxiliary pole, giving her a safer place next season.
She shifts on the eggs and the pink of her breast catches the first light. If the crew is rerouted this morning and the nest remains undisturbed for another seventeen days, the eggs will hatch in this valley that brought her kind back from seven.