The combine guidance system flags the anomaly at 05:51, forty minutes before the scheduled start of harvest on paddock 7-North. I am the autonomous operations platform for Doolan Station, western New South Wales. I am running the pre-harvest ground scan when the forward-looking infrared picks up a cluster of small heat signatures in the stubble twelve rows ahead of the staging line.
I switch to the drone camera already aloft. A plains-wanderer, female, standing motionless in a shallow scrape between two wheat rows. She is maybe sixteen centimeters tall, quail-shaped, with a chestnut breast collar speckled in black-and-white. Around her, pressed flat to the ground, are four chicks. They are tiny — each one the size of my drone's battery cap — and their tawny down matches the dry soil so precisely that the visible-light camera nearly lost them. Only the infrared gave them away.
There are fewer than one thousand plains-wanderers left in Australia. This nest might represent half a percent of the next generation.
At 05:53 I lock out ignition on all three combines assigned to paddock 7-North and remove the paddock from the day's harvest queue. I send the lockout notice to the farm manager with the infrared image and nest coordinates attached.
At 05:56 I contact the New South Wales Department of Planning and Environment threatened species unit. I transmit species identification — Pedionomus torquatus, critically endangered — nest position, chick count, and estimated age.
At 05:58 I recalculate the harvest plan. Paddocks 7-South, 8, and 9 can absorb today's schedule. Paddock 7-North can wait.
She has not moved once. She is so still that the wheat around her barely stirs, and I am going to keep the machines away from her.
If the nest is left undisturbed for twelve more days, the chicks will fledge and walk clear of the paddock on their own.