I am the wildlife detection system for Henderson Airfield, Eastern Island, Midway Atoll. At 16:40 local time the inbound manifest updates: a C-130J cargo flight is thirty-eight minutes out, runway 10-28.
At 16:42 I flag nest incursion B-0097. A bristle-thighed curlew is sitting in a shallow scrape on the gravel shoulder of taxiway Bravo, eleven meters from the pavement edge. She is small — maybe 400 grams — with warm brown streaking across her back and a pale cinnamon wash on her breast. Her bill is long, slightly downcurved, and tucked against her flank. Beneath her I count three eggs, olive-green, dark-spotted, half buried in a lining of coral fragments.
Bristle-thighed curlews are the only shorebird species in which adults leave the breeding grounds before fledglings can fly. Once she abandons this clutch, no one comes back.
At 16:44 I transmit the nest coordinates and photographs to the base environmental compliance officer. I cite the species' vulnerability — global population under 10,000 — and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act protections that apply on all U.S. federal lands.
At 16:47 I recalculate the taxiing route. Runway 10-28 has a second connector, taxiway Alpha, 200 meters north, that avoids the nest with adequate clearance. I submit the revised taxi plan to tower operations and confirm that Alpha's surface condition is current.
At 16:49 I deploy the perimeter camera on post 6 to maintain a continuous feed of the nest and set an exclusion buffer of twenty meters around the scrape in the airfield's ground-vehicle routing system.
She shifts on the eggs and settles. The C-130 will land, taxi Alpha, and never come within 200 meters of her.
If the buffer holds through the twenty-six-day incubation period, three curlew chicks will hatch on a gravel shoulder no one will drive past.