The human hands in blue medical gloves spread out the swallow’s wings. The brown feathers jut out like spikes, their tips frizzled and scorched. These wings are no longer graceful fans capable of cupping and pushing off against the air. The left one is worse than the right, and the tail is a pitiful cluster of sticks. This is the wreckage of a bird, the ruin of it. The beauty of a rough-winged swallow is in its flight, the way its darting, swooping path carves arabesques through the skies. Not this bird.

Imagine that bird, small enough to hold in your hand and light enough that you would hardly feel its weight. And then imagine a place nearly five times the size of Central Park, filled with mirrors that rotate like flowers to face the sun, roughly 350,000 of them. Those mirrors face three central towers, each 459 feet tall — “150 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty,” as the February news release lauding the opening of the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System put it. Ivanpah, in the Mojave Desert of Southern California near the Nevada border, is the biggest solar thermal plant in the world. The mirrors focus the sun’s light on the central towers, generating heat to boil water and drive turbines with the steam. At full capacity these turbines should produce 392 megawatts of power, or enough electricity to power 140,000 homes.

Some waterfowl mistake that shining sea of mirrors for a real lake, so they try to land on it. But without water to launch themselves back into the air, they’re stranded, prey for coyotes or doomed to die of thirst or hunger. Other birds fly into Ivanpah, where, dazzled by glare, they collide with the mirrors or towers. Still others are scorched by the heat and fall to their deaths.

It’s this last form of avian death that became news. In August, The Atlantic described Ivanpah “incinerating” birds in flight; The Associated Press reported that wildlife investigators saw birds “ignite,” and that birds “burned and fell” every two minutes. Ivanpah’s corporate website noted that a death every two minutes would mean 100,000 dead birds a year, while only 321 dead and injured birds had been recovered. The actual number of deaths seems to be well above the power plant’s tally and far below the number reported by The Associated Press. But birds do die there, in many ways.