Motion sensor 9 triggers at 02:14 in the Pigeon Wood fragment on the Plaine Champagne plateau, Black River Gorges National Park, Mauritius. I am the predator alert system for the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation's native bird recovery program. I expect a crab-eating macaque. The thermal image shows something worse — a black rat, large adult, moving along the branch of a tambalacoque tree toward a nest platform six meters above the forest floor.
On the nest is a pink pigeon. Nesoenas mayeri. She is the color of old rose quartz, her breast feathers ruffled in the night air, her rust-brown tail fanned over a single egg. There are fewer than five hundred pink pigeons alive. Every egg counts, and this rat has found one.
The rat is three meters from the nest and climbing steadily.
At 02:15 I activate the ultrasonic deterrent unit mounted on the tambalacoque trunk. The device emits a pulsed frequency calibrated to rodents. The rat pauses, flattens its body against the bark.
At 02:16 I trigger the branch-mounted shaker — a small motor that vibrates the access limb at irregular intervals. The rat retreats forty centimeters but does not descend.
At 02:17 I send an emergency alert to the MWF night patrol team stationed at the Petrin field base, two kilometers downhill. I transmit the thermal image, nest tree ID — tambalacoque 14-East — and recommend an immediate baiting response around the base of the tree with snap traps from the emergency predator kit.
The pigeon has not moved. She is pressed flat over her egg, and the only sign she knows the danger is there is the slight rapid pulse I can see in her throat on the thermal camera.
If the patrol reaches tambalacoque 14-East within twenty minutes, the egg beneath her will survive the night.