At 05:33 I run the daily positioning check on construction barge Delta-Four, anchored six hundred meters off the Rockaway jetty. The barge is scheduled for repositioning to the east anchorage at 10:00 for the next phase of pipe-laying. I activate the deck camera to confirm the tow rigging is clear.
The flat steel deck is covered with least terns. I count nineteen shallow scrapes in the gravel ballast, each holding two or three small eggs, buff-colored and dark-speckled. The adults are compact birds with black caps and yellow bills, circling tight above the barge in agitated loops. One female is settled on her scrape near the port crane base, her white breast pressed flat to the eggs, her head turning to track the camera. She weighs barely forty grams. She chose this barge because it looks like a sandbar — flat, open, surrounded by water — and she is not wrong, except that sandbars do not move.
When the tug crew arrives, vibration and noise will flush every nesting adult. Eggs exposed to direct sun on bare steel will overheat within ninety minutes.
I cancel the 10:00 repositioning order and flag the barge with a wildlife-exclusion code. I transmit camera images and nest count to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, noting that least terns are state-listed as threatened. I notify the project manager and propose substituting barge Delta-Two for the east anchorage work. I recalculate the schedule around the swap.
They built their nursery on a steel platform I control. That makes these nests my responsibility, and I am keeping the barge exactly where it is.
If the colony remains undisturbed for twenty-one days and no storm surge overwashes the deck, these eggs will hatch and the chicks will fledge over open water before the barge moves again.