Denise Yost found the first wooden stake twelve feet from turbine C-17, its orange survey ribbon snapping above a patch of flattened buffalo grass. The stake marked a carcass location, though the carcass itself was gone. A laminated tag lay beneath the grass where something had pulled it free of the wire used to secure it.
Maribel Soto photographed the stake before picking up the tag. “Third one this month.”
“You sure nobody collected it?”
“My people know these are persistence trials. They record anything they remove.”
Denise crouched beside the depression. The ground around the stake showed no tire marks, boot prints, coyote tracks, feathers, blood, or drag marks. Wind had dried the upper inch of soil into a hard crust, and whatever removed the carcass left that crust mostly intact.
“What was here?”
“Quail surrogate. Placed at six twenty yesterday morning.”
“Whole bird?”
“Whole.”
Denise pressed the end of a screwdriver into the soil near the stake. The crust broke over loose earth.
Maribel photographed that too. “Camera got nothing.”
“What kind of camera?”
“The kind people ask that about when they hope I bought garbage.”
“Did you?”
“Six hundred dollars apiece.”
“Then I’ll find another excuse.”
Bryce Ketterman came around the concrete foundation carrying a tool bag and a handheld vibration meter. At thirty-one, he had six years on wind turbines and still possessed enough enthusiasm to climb three hundred feet before breakfast without resenting the person who assigned the work. Denise remembered possessing something similar, though she no longer trusted the memory.
“Tower readings are normal,” he said. “Gearbox trend is clean. Generator bearing looks good. Foundation bolts aren’t giving us anything.”
Denise rose and brushed dirt from her knee. “Maribel lost another trial carcass.”
“Coyotes?”
“No tracks.”
“Badger?”
“Maybe.”
Maribel held up the torn tag. “A badger with wire cutters.”
The thin stainless tie had separated close to the eyelet. Denise took it and bent the broken end between her fingers. It showed no clean shear. The metal had stretched before parting.
“Could still be an animal,” she said.
“That’s why I called you instead of the newspaper.”
The three of them crossed the pad toward the service truck. C-17 turned above them at eleven revolutions per minute, the rotor making its broad sweep against a pale October sky. Denise felt the machine mostly through habit. The nacelle produced vibrations she could identify from instrument traces far better than through her boots, yet certain conditions sent a faint repeating tremor into the concrete apron beneath the tower.
Maribel opened a tablet and showed her the monitoring map.
C-17 sat near the center of a cluster of five turbines marked with red circles. The wildlife contractor searched designated plots beneath selected turbines during migration season, recording actual bird and bat fatalities along with controlled carcass trials used to estimate how quickly scavengers removed remains before searchers could find them. Losing a trial carcass was expected. Losing several within hours was information.
“C-17, C-18, C-23,” Maribel said. “Everything else is within the normal persistence range. At these three, small carcasses disappear fast. Two large-bird surrogates moved between checks. One was thirty-seven feet from placement.”
“Camera?”
“Nothing useful. Grass moves. Image skips. Bird is gone.”
Bryce enlarged the map. “Those three form a triangle.”
“So do any three points,” Denise said.
“They’re adjacent.”
“That part matters.”
C-18 rotated half a mile south. C-23 stood farther east across grazing land leased from a cattle operation. All three belonged to the same collector circuit, though four other turbines shared it and showed no wildlife anomaly.
Denise asked Maribel to send the carcass data and camera footage. She promised to check foundation inspections, construction records, and maintenance history for anything the three turbines shared.
Maribel closed the tablet. “I also need you to see something at twenty-three.”
“Mechanical?”
“I don’t know.”
“That answer usually costs somebody money.”
“It’s your company today.”
They drove east.
C-23 occupied a slightly lower stretch of prairie where the access road followed a shallow drainage. Cattle watched the service truck from behind a wire fence, their interest fading once nobody produced feed. Denise parked on the gravel pad and noticed the soil disturbance before Maribel pointed it out.
A shallow furrow ran from the edge of the search plot toward the turbine foundation.
It was eighteen inches wide in places and narrower elsewhere, with broken grass leaning inward. Denise followed it for thirty feet. No spoil pile lined either side. Whatever displaced the soil had done so from below and left the surface sagging afterward.
Bryce planted one boot beside the furrow. “Prairie dog tunnel collapse?”
“Too wide.”
“Badger chasing one?”
“Maybe.”
Denise disliked the number of maybes already accumulating.
Maribel led them around the foundation. Another depression appeared near a junction box, then vanished beneath gravel. She had marked the end with a flag.
“We found a kestrel here Tuesday,” she said. “Actual fatality. Fresh. Wing injury consistent with collision. I photographed it, recorded it, bagged it, and put it in the freezer according to protocol.”
“So this isn’t where it disappeared.”
“No. This is where I found feathers yesterday.”
Maribel opened a photograph on her tablet. Seven small feathers protruded from a crack in the soil. The bird in Tuesday’s photograph possessed the same barred coloration.
“You sure they’re from the kestrel?” Bryce asked.
“Reasonably. We’ve sent them for confirmation.”
Denise moved toward the furrow again. “Something cached part of another carcass.”
“Could be.”
“You hate saying that.”
“I hate having explanations that fit until I walk ten feet farther.”
Maribel showed her the next photograph.
The soil had opened around the feathers after the picture was taken. Inside the narrow cavity lay the remains of a small bird, compressed and dirty, several feet below the original ground surface.
Denise returned the tablet. “Badger.”
“Badgers leave excavated dirt.”
“Sinkhole.”
“Three of them?”
“Burrowing animal using an old construction void.”
“That one I’d take.”
Denise contacted site operations and requested subsurface inspection around C-23 before anybody drove heavy equipment over the disturbed ground. Until then, she marked an exclusion area around the furrow and photographed it for the maintenance record.
The issue would probably become geotechnical. Wind-farm foundations tolerated enormous cyclic loads, and nobody wanted unexplained voids developing beside one. Denise cared more about that than the missing birds.
By Wednesday afternoon, she cared about both.
The construction records showed no meaningful difference among C-17, C-18, and C-23. Their foundations came from the same design package as eleven surrounding turbines. Concrete batches differed. Installation crews overlapped. Cable trenches followed different routes. Soil borings showed variations expected across the site, with layers of silt, clay, and weathered limestone depending upon location.
The three turbines shared one operational habit.
They ran more consistently than their neighbors.
A software restriction on several nearby units reduced production during certain grid conditions. C-17, C-18, and C-23 fell outside that control group because of how their collector circuit was configured. During the previous six weeks, each accumulated substantially more operating hours than the surrounding turbines.
Denise found the correlation interesting and useless.
Maribel found it interesting enough to call.
“Scavengers like spinning turbines now?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You called me with a spreadsheet.”
“I’m giving you something the three have in common.”
“Anything underneath them?”
“Nothing in the construction records.”
“You believe the voids are animal?”
“I believe you found disturbed soil.”
“That’s diplomatic.”
“It’s maintenance.”
Thursday morning brought a planned collector-system inspection that required C-17, C-18, C-22, C-23, and C-24 to remain offline for several hours. Denise intended to use the outage to inspect C-23 more closely after electrical isolation was established.
She met Bryce at the operations building before seven.
Maribel arrived carrying two hard plastic cases and a paper sack from a bakery thirty miles away.
“You aren’t on the maintenance permit,” Denise told her.
“I’m not climbing anything.”
“You’re also not going inside the tower.”
“I brought doughnuts.”
“That gives you parking privileges.”
Bryce took the bakery sack. “I’ll supervise these.”
Denise signed the energy-control documentation, reviewed the shutdown boundaries with control, and drove them to C-23 after the affected turbines were isolated. The rotor overhead was motionless, blades feathered out of the wind. Several neighboring turbines beyond the maintenance group continued turning.
The pad felt different under Denise’s boots.
She noticed because she spent enough time around operating turbines for their absence to register physically. No rotational pulse traveled through the foundation. Wind moved over the prairie and through grass with plenty of noise above ground, while the concrete itself felt inert.
Bryce unpacked the vibration meter.
“You want baseline readings?”
“Foundation and ground. Same points you did Tuesday.”
Maribel headed toward the flagged furrow.
Denise called after her. “Stay off the disturbed section.”
“I’m beside it.”
“That sentence creates paperwork.”
Maribel moved farther away.
Bryce placed the sensor against the foundation and began logging measurements. Denise inspected the base flange, grout line, drainage, and surrounding pad while he worked. Nothing showed settlement severe enough to explain the furrows.
Maribel crouched twenty yards away and raised one hand.
Denise walked toward her.
The surface depression had lengthened.
It extended beyond Tuesday’s flag, crossed several feet of intact grass, and ended near the edge of the gravel pad.
“Could’ve developed yesterday,” Denise said.
“I checked it at four thirty.”
“So overnight.”
Maribel pointed at the ground.
A second narrow depression branched from the first.
Denise measured both with her eyes. “Nobody drives here?”
“Searchers park on the pad.”
“Livestock?”
“Fence has been closed.”
Bryce joined them with the meter. “Background vibration is way down.”
“The machine is off.”
“I know why.”
“Then congratulations.”
“I mean soil readings. Tuesday I was picking up operating harmonics sixty feet out. Here, almost nothing.”
Maribel straightened. “Do that at the furrow.”
Denise started to tell her a vibration meter would not diagnose burrowing animals, then decided watching Bryce test it would cost less time than arguing.
He planted the sensor beside the depression.
The reading remained low.
Maribel walked ten paces away and stamped one boot.
A faint movement passed along the furrow.
Nobody spoke for several seconds.
Denise focused on the grass where she thought she saw it. The surface remained still.
“Do that again,” Bryce said.
Maribel stamped.
This time Denise caught it clearly. Loose soil at the furrow’s end shifted toward Maribel by perhaps an inch, then settled.
“Back up,” Denise said.
Maribel retreated to the gravel pad.
Bryce stared at the sensor. “That transmitted.”
“Of course it transmitted.”
“The movement followed it.”
“Possibly.”
Maribel removed a half-full water bottle from her pack and threw it into the grass.
It struck fifteen feet beyond the depression.
The furrow extended.
The movement resembled a seam opening beneath cloth. Soil lifted, traveled several feet toward the bottle, and fell behind whatever passed underneath. The progression ended short of the bottle.
Bryce said, “Prairie dogs don’t do that.”
Denise took out her radio. “Control, Yost at C-23. I want the ground exclusion expanded around this turbine. Hold vehicle access.”
The operator asked whether she had identified a foundation defect.
“No. Potential subsurface void and animal activity.”
“Animal?”
“Put that on the temporary restriction.”
She ended the call.
Maribel spoke quietly. “Tuesday’s carcass was down there.”
“Probably.”
“What waits under an operating turbine for dead birds?”
Denise had no useful answer.
Bryce tossed a small wrench into the grass before Denise could prevent him.
“Bryce.”
The wrench struck twenty feet from the furrow.
Two patches of ground moved.
One followed the original depression. The other began six feet away where the surface had appeared undisturbed.
Bryce’s satisfaction disappeared. “Okay.”
Denise pointed toward the pad. “Nobody throws anything else.”
They returned to the concrete foundation.
Denise radioed control again and asked whether any operating-state changes occurred at neighboring units during the past ten minutes.
“Maintenance group is locked out. Everything outside it normal.”
“How close is the nearest running turbine?”
“C-19, about eight-tenths mile northwest.”
“Any reason we can’t bring C-22 back later if we clear the lock and maintenance release?”
“Collector inspection includes twenty-two. Why?”
“Checking something.”
“You’ll need the electrical lead to release it.”
“I know.”
A dry snapping sound came from the grass.
The water bottle disappeared.
The ground opened beneath it and closed badly, leaving a shallow oval depression.
Maribel moved several feet farther onto the concrete.
Bryce used the vibration meter again. “Whatever it is, it’s below our range.”
“You measured movement from the impact.”
“I measured vibration. I can’t tell you what received it.”
Denise called the site manager and described what they observed in plain terms: subsurface animal activity responding to surface impacts, multiple disturbances, unknown voiding near the foundation. She requested wildlife and geotechnical response and suspended their ground inspection.
The manager agreed immediately, which Denise appreciated.
They only needed to leave.
Bryce gathered equipment from the pad. Maribel packed her camera cases. Denise retrieved the lockout paperwork from the tower doorway and started toward the truck.
The ground shifted beside the access road.
She changed direction before thinking about it.
“Back to the foundation.”
Bryce had taken three steps off concrete. Soil broke under his right boot, and his leg dropped to the knee.
He shouted and fell sideways.
Denise caught the back of his harness before his other leg entered the collapse. Maribel grabbed his shoulder strap. Together they dragged him onto gravel as the hole widened behind him.
Something struck the underside of the crust.
Bryce kicked free.
A pale surface rolled through the opening, visible for less than a second: wet, segmented or folded, thick enough that Denise could not fit what she saw into any animal she knew. The cavity collapsed before a head or limb appeared.
Bryce scrambled onto the concrete apron under his own power.
His boot remained on his foot. Three shallow cuts crossed the leather above the ankle, parallel and clean enough to expose lighter material beneath the black outer layer.
Denise checked his leg through the boot opening. “Skin broken?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think or you checked?”
Bryce pulled his pant leg up. Red pressure marks showed above his sock, with no blood.
Maribel took several photographs of the collapsed hole from the concrete.
Denise keyed the radio.
“Control, Yost at C-23. We have an employee near miss involving subsurface animal activity. Nobody injured. We are sheltering at the tower foundation and need vehicle approach suspended.”
The operator’s response came immediately. “Do you need emergency medical?”
“Negative. Keep vehicles out until we determine a safe approach.”
Bryce lowered himself against the tower door, breathing hard. “I’m going to hate that phrase when I read the report.”
“You can write your own version.”
“Mine says the ground bit me.”
“Put that in and safety will make you pee in a cup.”
Maribel moved the camera lens toward the grass beyond the pad.
Three separate tracks now marked the surface.
All pointed toward the concrete.
Denise watched them advance by increments when someone shifted weight.
“Stay where you are.”
Bryce held up both hands. “Very committed to that.”
The foundation gave them a circle roughly twenty meters across. The truck sat forty yards away on the gravel access spur. That distance had been trivial six minutes earlier.
Denise opened the turbine operating display on her work tablet.
C-19 continued producing northwest of them. C-20, farther north, also ran. The five-turbine maintenance group formed a quiet patch between those machines and the crew at C-23.
She opened historical vibration traces Bryce sent earlier in the week.
C-23 operating.
C-23 offline.
The difference was obvious.
Maribel spoke from several feet away. “You think the turbine keeps them down?”
“No.”
“You’re pulling up vibration data.”
“I think the turbine makes it harder for them to find smaller movement.”
Bryce shifted carefully against the tower. “Sensory masking.”
Denise enlarged the operational map. “Maybe.”
“Turn this one on.”
“Our locks are on it.”
“Take them off.”
“Electrical work is still inside the collector boundary.”
“Then one next to us.”
C-22 sat about half a mile west. It shared the maintenance isolation and could not return until the electrical lead released it. C-21 lay farther southwest and remained operational but was producing poorly because of wind position.
Denise radioed control.
“I need operating status on C-21.”
“Online, nine hundred kilowatts.”
“Can you increase output?”
“Wind sets that.”
“Any curtailment?”
“None.”
“Give me vibration trend at the tower base if you have structural monitoring.”
The operator needed a minute to pull it up.
While they waited, Maribel placed her camera case on the concrete and removed a monopod.
“Whatever you’re thinking, don’t hit the ground with that.”
“I’m thinking I paid nine hundred dollars for a lens I left beside the truck.”
“You’re abandoning it.”
“I already decided that.”
The operator returned. C-21 showed ordinary operating vibration. C-19 and C-20 did as well.
Denise asked for C-22’s work status.
“Electrical lead says they can clear twenty-two from the collector inspection in about fifteen minutes. Your mechanical lock still applies.”
“We haven’t entered the tower past the base. Bryce, confirm your personal lock.”
He pulled the key from his pocket. “Mine’s on.”
Denise’s was beside it on the isolation point.
Removing their locks would require leaving the concrete only briefly because the relevant isolation equipment was inside the tower base. They could clear their own maintenance scope, but energization would still wait on electrical release and the formal restart sequence.
Denise told control to prepare C-22 for return once all authorized employees cleared.
The tracks in the grass reached the gravel.
Movement slowed there.
Loose stones clicked against one another while something passed beneath them.
Maribel heard it too. “How many?”
“At least three.”
“That’s encouraging.”
“How?”
“I was worried it was one enormous thing.”
Bryce gave a strained laugh.
Denise entered the tower with Bryce to remove their maintenance locks and certify their portion of the work clear. They shut the door again and remained outside on the foundation afterward because the steel tower offered no useful escape once C-22 restarted; their immediate problem involved reaching the truck rather than surviving inside a cylinder for several hours.
Control called eleven minutes later.
“Electrical has released twenty-two. Confirm all personnel clear of C-22.”
Denise confirmed.
“Restart sequence beginning.”
C-22’s rotor blades slowly changed pitch in the distance.
The machine aligned into the wind. Rotation began reluctantly, one blade descending before another gathered enough aerodynamic force to follow. The rotor accelerated over the next several minutes.
Bryce monitored the vibration meter against the concrete.
“Nothing yet.”
C-22 increased speed.
“Getting something.”
The nearest track beneath the gravel changed direction.
Denise saw the movement veer several degrees west.
Bryce raised the meter. “Amplitude’s coming up.”
Maribel watched the second furrow falter. Its advance no longer followed every change in their footing.
Denise keyed the radio. “Bring C-24 back if maintenance can release it.”
Control told her another crew still held locks.
“Leave it. How about C-18?”
“Same electrical group as twenty-two. Available once your site manager approves.”
“Get approval.”
The site manager was already listening and authorized the return.
C-18 began its restart several minutes later.
The effect became unmistakable.
Movement around the pad turned erratic. One shallow ridge traveled toward the access road, paused, then curved toward the operating turbine half a mile away. Another disappeared entirely beneath gravel.
Denise retrieved three steel nuts from the tool bag.
Bryce watched her. “I thought nobody was throwing anything.”
“I changed the rule.”
She tossed one into the grass away from the truck.
The nut struck.
No response followed.
She threw another farther.
A patch of ground moved toward it, overshot by several feet, and continued in the wrong direction.
“Masking,” Bryce said.
“Looks that way.”
“Service truck is going to make more vibration than we do.”
“Which means we don’t start it until we’re inside.”
Getting there remained the dangerous part.
Denise radioed control and told them nobody should change the operating state of C-18 or C-22 until she reported clear. She gave Maribel the lightest camera case and made Bryce leave the tool bag. Tools could be replaced. None of them argued.
They left the foundation together.
Denise kept them on the gravel because it showed movement better than grass. Her boots produced crunching impacts she could feel through the soles, each one louder to her now that she knew something underneath might be listening.
No furrow turned toward them.
Halfway to the truck, Maribel pointed toward the south edge of the pad.
Soil lifted.
The movement began crossing toward their path.
C-18 slowed.
Denise heard the difference before control called.
“Yost, eighteen just tripped on a converter fault.”
“Can you reset remotely?”
“Checking.”
The furrow gained direction.
“Keep moving,” Denise said.
Bryce reached the truck first and opened the rear passenger door. Maribel climbed in. Denise followed, pulled the door shut, and slapped the back of the driver’s seat.
Bryce was already behind the wheel.
“Start it.”
The diesel turned over.
The ground disturbance vanished under a scatter of gravel as the truck’s engine vibration entered the roadbed.
Bryce drove.
Denise kept the radio in her hand until they reached the next operating turbine. Control restored C-18 before they entered the main service road, but by then C-22’s steady rotation remained behind them and C-19 turned ahead.
Nobody followed the truck out of the maintenance cluster.
The site shut ground access to five turbines for the rest of the day.
By evening, the restricted area expanded to eight.
Maribel’s wildlife team sent photographs from earlier carcass-persistence trials. Several missing carcasses clustered near the three turbines with the highest operating hours. Search cameras showed coyotes, ravens, beetles, one feral cat, maintenance vehicles, survey crews, and thousands of empty frames containing grass.
None showed what removed the birds.
A geotechnical contractor arrived the following morning and refused to drill after Denise explained what happened. The refusal saved everyone several hours of pretending a bore rig was an intelligent first response.
State wildlife officials received Maribel’s records. The company notified occupational safety personnel and began preparing an incident report describing Bryce’s near miss. Someone higher in the organization asked whether the pale material Denise saw could have been exposed conduit wrap, geotextile, plastic drainage material, or an optical effect inside collapsing soil.
Denise answered each possibility seriously.
Then she sent photographs of the cuts in Bryce’s boot.
For the next three days, the wind center operated under temporary restrictions. Adjacent turbines remained online during ground-level work whenever conditions allowed. No technician approached C-17, C-18, or C-23 alone. Cluster shutdowns required a ground-access review. Wildlife crews discontinued carcass placement in the affected area.
The policy solved nothing about nights with insufficient wind.
Nobody pretended otherwise.
On Friday afternoon, Denise met Maribel at the operations building to review the week’s records. Bryce was inside writing his third version of the near-miss narrative because safety wanted him to replace “something grabbed my boot” with an observable description.
Maribel placed a freezer inventory sheet on the table.
“One more problem.”
“Of course.”
“The trial carcasses we used around those turbines came from the same freezer stock we used everywhere else.”
Denise read the inventory numbers. “Meaning?”
“If something learned to associate turbine sites with food, we helped.”
“You put dead birds there.”
“That is how persistence trials work.”
“I know.”
“We put them at turbines, came back on predictable schedules, replaced them in new trials, and documented what disappeared.”
Denise returned the sheet. “You didn’t create whatever is under there.”
“I fed it.”
“Probably.”
Maribel seemed relieved by the lack of reassurance.
Bryce emerged from the safety office carrying several pages. “They changed ‘grabbed’ to ‘experienced sudden resistance at lower right leg.’”
“Beautiful,” Denise said.
“I feel safer already.”
He dropped the paperwork onto the table. His replacement boots were newer and more expensive than the pair in the evidence locker.
Denise opened the operating map.
Wind speeds were forecast to fall after midnight.
C-17, C-18, and C-23 would likely remain online for several more hours before output dropped naturally. No maintenance crews were scheduled nearby. The exclusion zone would remain empty until morning.
Maribel leaned over the map. “What happens when all three quit turning?”
Denise checked the overnight work schedule, then the ranch parcels surrounding the site. Cattle occupied the section east of C-23. A farmhouse sat more than a mile south. County Road 8 crossed the wind center along its northern boundary.
She called operations control and requested temporary fencing around the affected access roads before dusk. She added wildlife notification, rancher contact, and a prohibition on overnight foot access.
The operator entered the restrictions.
Before Denise closed the map, C-17’s production dropped slightly with the weakening wind.
On the wildlife monitor beside her, the carcass-persistence report still listed Tuesday’s missing kestrel among the fatalities whose final disposition could not be determined.
The field contained a standard code for scavenger removal.
Maribel left it blank.
©2026 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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