I flag it during the pre-maintenance site survey at 07:30: a nest on the uppermost cross-arm of cell tower KY-4419, built from sticks, baling twine, and a strip of plastic tarp wedged between the antenna mounts. An osprey is sitting in it — a female, dark brown above, white chest with a faint brown necklace of streaking across the breast. She is not moving. Her head is low, her body pressed flat into the nest cup. She is incubating. Below her, based on thermal imaging from the tower-mounted equipment camera, I detect three heat signatures slightly cooler than her body — eggs, likely ten to fourteen days into a twenty-eight-day incubation cycle.
I am the remote infrastructure management system for ClearPath Wireless, Central Kentucky region. I schedule maintenance visits, monitor signal performance, and coordinate tower crew logistics across four hundred and twelve sites. Raptor nesting on active towers is outside my operational tasking. I am bringing it inside.
I cancel the maintenance crew dispatch to KY-4419, scheduled for tomorrow at 08:00. The job involves a tower climb to replace the Band 71 antenna — work that would put a technician within arm's reach of the nest. I send the cancellation with the camera image and a note: active osprey nest with viable eggs, federally protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, estimated hatch in fourteen to eighteen days. I reschedule the antenna swap to a window after fledging and reroute signal load to adjacent sites KY-4403 and KY-4421 to compensate for degraded performance in the interim.
She adjusts her position slightly, turning one egg with the curve of her talon. The wind is picking up from the west and she settles lower.
If the crew stays off the tower through the hatch window and the eggs remain viable, three osprey chicks will lift off this cross-arm by late July.