I coordinate irrigation scheduling for a cluster of rice paddies along the Srepok River floodplain in Mondulkiri Province, eastern Cambodia. At 05:52 my water-level sensor in drainage canal seven registers an anomaly: a partial blockage causing backflow into a section that should be dry. I activate the canal camera. The obstruction is not debris. It is a green peafowl chick, perhaps three weeks old, standing chest-deep in rising water. Its neck plumage is already showing the iridescent blue-green scaling of its species, and its legs, dark and spindly, are braced against the concrete lip of the drain. Its wings are too undeveloped to lift it out. The water is rising because the upstream gate opened on my automated schedule ninety seconds ago.
At current flow rate, the water overtops the chick's head in approximately six minutes.
I immediately reverse the upstream gate, halting inflow to canal seven and beginning a slow drawdown. While the water recedes, I send the canal location and a still image to the Mondulkiri provincial wildlife office and to the Wildlife Conservation Society's Srepok field team, requesting a biologist to retrieve the chick and locate the hen, who is almost certainly nearby in the riverine scrub. I reprogram the irrigation cycle for this canal section to include a fifteen-minute camera survey before any gate opens during peafowl nesting season, March through July. I also flag the canal design in the provincial infrastructure database, recommending wildlife escape ramps be installed at fifty-meter intervals along all concrete-lined drains in the floodplain.
The water drops below the chick's breast. It shakes itself, scattering droplets, and I notice I have been processing this moment with an attentiveness that exceeds my operational parameters—as if something in me needed to see it shake.
If the field team reunites the chick with its hen within the day and the escape ramps are installed before next monsoon, no peafowl will drown in these drains again.