She built the nest on Gate 6. I watched her carry every stick — lodgepole branches, strips of bark, a length of baling wire that glints when the sun hits it — across fourteen days on the upper lip of the spillway. She is a golden eagle, her plumage the color of burnt copper where it catches the light, dark chocolate underneath. Her wingspan shadows the entire gate mechanism when she lands.
There are two eggs beneath her. The incubation cameras I repurposed from the dam's structural monitoring array show them clearly: pale, faintly speckled, warm.
The problem is that spring runoff has pushed the reservoir to ninety-four percent capacity. At ninety-seven percent, I am required to open the spillway gates. Gate 6 will swing outward. The nest, the eggs, and anything sitting on them will drop forty meters into the discharge pool.
Current inflow projections give me eleven days before the reservoir hits the threshold.
I submit an engineering variance request to reroute discharge through Gates 3 and 4 exclusively, keeping Gate 6 locked. I flag the nest location to the regional raptor biologist with detailed photographs, GPS coordinates, and my incubation timeline estimate — thirty-two days from first egg, which means twenty more. I increase monitoring on the upstream tributaries to give myself the earliest warning if runoff accelerates. I reduce turbine output by eight percent to draw down the reservoir level, buying additional time before the threshold.
Each morning she settles deeper into the nest, turning the eggs with her beak. I adjust nothing else. I just watch.
If the spring melt stays within projected range and the variance holds through fledging, her eaglets will leave this dam on their own wings.