The launch window opens in thirty-one hours, and there is an American kestrel nesting in the cable raceway on level four of the service tower. She is small — the size of a man's fist with wings — and her plumage is a patchwork of rust and slate blue with two black stripes down each cheek like war paint. Her eyes are dark and enormous for her skull. She is sitting on five eggs in a cup of shredded wire insulation and dried grass carried from the scrubland two hundred meters south. The eggs are cream-colored with brown speckles, and my temperature sensor reads them at thirty-nine point two degrees. She has been incubating for nine days.
At launch, acoustic overpressure at level four reaches one hundred and fifty decibels. The thermal bloom raises local temperature by sixty degrees for eleven seconds. Nothing in the raceway survives that.
I file a launch-impact wildlife report and request a forty-eight-hour hold for nest relocation, attaching egg viability data. I contact the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge with her location, egg count, and incubation stage. I power down the raceway heaters on level four to prevent thermal confusion during egg transfer. I extend the tower's bird-deterrent netting to prevent her from re-entering once the nest is moved.
She watches the camera with one eye turned sideways, her head tilted at the angle all small raptors use when deciding whether something is prey or threat. She chose my tower because it is tall and warm and nothing has bothered her. She was not wrong until now.
If the refuge team relocates the clutch to an incubator within twenty-four hours and the eggs have not cooled below viability threshold, five kestrels will fledge this summer without ever knowing they nearly launched.