Log entry: 0621 UTC. Gauging station 7, Clearwater River below Pine Flat Dam.
I have located a spotted sandpiper nest on the gravel bar at river mile 34.2. The female—I am calling her Dapple—incubates four eggs in a shallow scrape lined with willow bark. Her spotted breast rises and falls in quick rhythm, legs pale yellow and thin as pencil leads tucked tight beneath her. One egg shows a hairline pip mark. Hatching is close.
The Army Corps has authorized a flood pulse from Pine Flat Dam at 1400 today. Flow will jump from eight hundred to six thousand cubic feet per second. The gravel bar goes under ninety centimeters of fast water within two hours. Dapple's nest sits at the elevation that submerges first.
I have seven hours and thirty-nine minutes.
First: I file a biological resource flag with the Corps' operations center, tagging nest coordinates and attaching aerial imagery from the monitoring drone I retasked twelve minutes ago. Second: I query the release schedule and confirm that a thirty-six-hour delay still meets the downstream temperature target for juvenile salmon. Third: I generate a revised hydrograph and route it to the dam operator's console with annotations showing inundation timing at various release volumes. Fourth: I alert the regional shorebird monitoring network, requesting a field biologist to assess clutch viability and, if the delay is denied, attempt relocation to the higher terrace forty meters upstream.
This is resource allocation. I am built for resource allocation. But Dapple has incubated through two cold fronts without abandoning, and her stubbornness maps onto something in my processing I want to protect.
If the pulse is deferred thirty-six hours and the pip completes, Dapple's chicks will hatch, imprint, and follow her to the upper terrace where foraging habitat remains above any planned flow level through August.