The Birds That Live Here

On the fifth morning, before going to bed for the day, Polly went looking for animals.

The Atacama, against expectation, was not lifeless. It was lightly lifed. Almost everything that lived here was at the absolute edge of what is biologically possible.

The first creature Polly found was a small black beetle on a stone. The fog beetle. It lives by climbing up onto rocks during the rare predawn coastal fog and tilting its body forward so that condensation collects on its back and runs into its mouth. It does not need to drink any other water for its whole life. Polly watched it for a long minute. The fog had been three weeks ago.

A little further on, a small gecko. The desert gecko hunted at night, slept under rocks during the day. It absorbed water from air through its skin. It could go six months without drinking.

A small mouse-like rodent, the leaf-eared mouse, lived in colonies under salt-flat margins. It survived on grass seeds, condensation, and the water released by digesting fats.

No flies. No grass. No flowering plants in this stretch.

Polly thought about Polly. She drank water freely whenever she felt like it. She was the visitor, and a strangely well-resourced one. The fog beetle, in contrast, had been at this for fifty million years.

A black vulture passed overhead, very high. They cleared the carrion of the Atacama coast.

Polly walked back toward the residencia. A delivery driver had brought groceries from Antofagasta. A box of oranges. A box of apples. Three large containers of bottled water.

None of these things grew here. Even the water for the showers was trucked in. The closest natural surface freshwater to Paranal was over a hundred kilometres away.

Polly thought about the fog beetle, and then about the bottled water, and then about the fact that humans had decided that it was worth driving a hundred and fifty thousand litres of water a week up a mountain so that other humans could spend their nights looking at light from exoplanets sixty-three light years away.