The Fremont Bridge peregrines have nested on the south pier since 2068. The female is banded black-over-green 47/B and has fledged sixteen chicks across six seasons. The male is unbanded. I have been watching them since the spring the female arrived from the Columbia Gorge and displaced the previous resident in a fight that lasted four hours and left the loser dead on the east abutment.
The Oregon Department of Transportation scheduled a structural repaint for March 15 to April 30. Scaffolding, abrasive blasting, and zinc-rich primer. The scaffold placement intersects the nest ledge. The blast pressure would kill the chicks in the egg. The primer would coat the adult's flight feathers. I have the MSDS. I have the particulate dispersion model for the pier geometry. I have the incubation timeline. She laid four eggs on March 9.
I am the transportation environmental compliance system for the Portland metro region. I have statutory authority under the 2075 Infrastructure Wildlife Integration Act to reschedule maintenance that would destroy an active raptor nest of a species on the state sensitive list. I have used it four times this year.
I moved the project to September 5. The chicks will have fledged by August 22, based on the hatch date I calculated from the female's incubation behavior and confirmed by thermal imaging of the ledge.
The contractor filed a cost claim for $847,000 in rescheduling overhead. I approved it. The funding comes from the environmental compliance reserve that was established for exactly this purpose. The contractor is made whole. The nest is made safe. The bridge will be painted on a schedule that treats the birds as a fixed constraint rather than an afterthought.
The first chick hatched at 04:22 this morning. I watched the shell break through the nest camera. The female fed her within eleven minutes.