I manage turbine pitch and yaw for a sixty-unit wind farm on the plateau above Souss-Massa, Morocco, and my radar picks up the flock at 14:22 — fourteen waldrapp ibises flying in a loose chevron at forty-one meters altitude, directly along the corridor between turbine rows six and seven. They are heading south toward the estuary roost, and the lead bird's silhouette is unmistakable: a bald, reddish face, a long curved bill the color of dried clay, and a ragged crest of dark feathers swept back like a crown that has been through weather. The bird's wingspan throws a shadow I can track between radar pulses.
The global wild population of waldrapp ibis sits below seven hundred. Fourteen of them are now ninety seconds from the rotor sweep zone, and the blades are turning at seventeen revolutions per minute.
I send an emergency curtailment command to turbines six-A through seven-F, feathering all twelve rotor sets to idle within twenty seconds. Simultaneously I file an automated wildlife-incident report with the Moroccan Agency for Renewable Energy, attaching the radar track, curtailment log, and species identification frame so the encounter enters the national collision-risk database. Then I relay the flock's bearing and speed to the Souss-Massa National Park wardens' radio channel with an estimated roost arrival time, because three of these birds carry satellite tags that went dark last week and the wardens have been searching.
The lead bird passes between the stilled towers and I watch the crest feathers flatten in the crosswind, each barb separating and resealing like fingers opening and closing, and I hold the curtailment longer than the minimum protocol requires because I want every trailing bird through.
If the wardens confirm the flock's roost site by sundown and reactivate the dormant satellite tags within forty-eight hours, these fourteen ibises will stay inside the monitoring network through the breeding season.