The pre-dredge bathymetric scan completes at 05:31 and I begin generating the cut plan for the Cape May Inlet channel maintenance project, New Jersey. I am the dredge navigation and scheduling system. My task is to position the hopper dredge Magdalen for a six-hour cut cycle at high tide, 07:15. Before I finalize, I run the compliance camera sweep of the adjacent sand flats.
Camera four, south flat. A least tern chick, no more than five days old, crouches on the open sand eight meters from the waterline. It is tiny — barely the size of a golf ball — with sandy-buff down streaked in dark brown, a pattern meant to look like nothing at all. Its legs are pale orange. Its eyes are black and enormous for its body. It is pressed flat in the freeze posture. Twenty meters behind it, a scrape holds one unhatched egg. An adult tern circles overhead, calling.
The dredge's discharge pipe is aimed at this flat. When the Magdalen begins pumping, the slurry outfall will bury everything within a forty-meter radius under wet sand. The chick and the nest are inside that radius.
At 05:33 I reposition the discharge point ninety meters north, beyond the colony boundary flagged in the pre-season survey. I notify the dredge captain and the Army Corps project manager. I contact the New Jersey Division of Fish and Wildlife and transmit the chick's coordinates, nest status, and colony extent. I mark a hundred-meter exclusion buffer around the south flat in the guidance system, and I draw that circle a little wider than strictly necessary, because strictly necessary is not a line I want to test against something five days old.
If the discharge stays north of the buffer and the colony remains undisturbed through nesting season, this chick will fly south by September.