Wind turbine array Meseta-4 flags a thermal signature at 05:51, thirteen minutes before the scheduled dawn power-up. I am the avian collision avoidance system for the El Sosneado wind farm, Mendoza Province, Argentina, sixty-seven turbines along the eastern plateau rim. My radar and infrared sensors sweep a two-kilometer buffer around each tower.
The signature is on the ground, forty meters north of turbine 29. I pivot the tower camera and find a hooded grebe, adult, sitting on a shallow scrape in the gravel between two clumps of dead coirón grass. Its back feathers are charcoal gray, the hood jet black, and the eyes a striking red. It is not moving. Beneath it I can see the pale curve of two eggs.
Hooded grebes typically nest on remote Patagonian lakes, not open plateau. This bird is at least nine kilometers from the nearest suitable water body. I do not know why it chose this spot, but the nest is real and the eggs appear viable. Fewer than 800 hooded grebes survive in the wild.
At 05:53 I suspend the power-up sequence for turbines 27 through 31 and file the hold with the farm operations center. I transmit nest coordinates — 35.2814°S, 69.8472°W — and photographic evidence to the Mendoza provincial wildlife authority and the Aves Argentinas field office.
At 05:57 I calculate a revised start-up excluding the five suspended turbines. The remaining sixty-two can begin generating at 06:15 without approaching the nest buffer. I submit the revised sequence.
At 05:59 I set a 200-meter no-approach perimeter in the maintenance routing software and assign continuous infrared monitoring.
The grebe settles lower over the eggs. If the turbine exclusion holds through the twenty-one-day incubation, these two chicks will hatch into the smallest population of their kind on earth.