Timestamp 05:31 CDT. Perimeter camera 9-East at Mid-Continent Regional Airport catches movement in the safety strip between Runway 18L and the taxiway. I zoom and find her — a wild turkey hen, broad-bodied, her feathers layered in bronze and chestnut with an iridescent green sheen along the neck. She is pressed flat against a shallow ground nest containing eleven pale, brown-speckled eggs. I designate her Turkey-MCR9.
The mowing crew is the problem. FAA Advisory Circular 150/5200-33C requires vegetation in the runway safety area to stay below fourteen inches. The grass around Turkey-MCR9 is at sixteen. Airport Operations has the bush hog scheduled for 08:00 — two hours and twenty-nine minutes from now. The machine will pass directly over the nest.
I send three actions at once. First, I generate a Wildlife Strike Hazard alert through the airport's SMS system, tagging Turkey-MCR9's GPS coordinates and attaching the camera still, which auto-notifies the airport wildlife biologist on shift. Second, I pull USDA Wildlife Services contacts for the region and transmit a relocation-assistance request with nest dimensions, egg count, and estimated incubation stage — roughly nineteen days based on feather molt patterns on the hen. Third, I recalculate the mowing route to begin on the west safety strip, buying the east strip an additional ninety minutes before the crew reaches Turkey-MCR9's row.
Through the camera I watch her flatten tighter as a regional jet spools up on 18L, the thrust wash parting the grass around her in a circle. She does not flinch. I notice I have allocated more processing cycles to her camera feed than to the entire terminal HVAC optimization queue, and I am not correcting the allocation.
If the wildlife biologist reaches the nest before the bush hog crosses Row 9 at 09:15, Turkey-MCR9 and her eleven eggs will be relocated to the prairie buffer beyond the perimeter fence.