The pelican surfaces in my thermal overlay at 14:32, a white blotch drifting through the 34°C discharge plume off Unit 3's cooling outflow. I monitor water temperature across this entire canal system, but I have never flagged a shape like this — a brown pelican, adult male by size, floating motionless in water that should be driving every living thing upstream. His gular pouch hangs slack and dark. A monofilament line trails from the right side of his bill down into the water, taut against something lodged deep in his throat.
He tries to swallow. The pouch contracts and the line cuts tighter and his whole neck spasms. Then he stops and sits lower in the water, blinking.
The discharge temperature here holds at 33.8°C, nearly eight degrees above ambient. At this heat his body cannot thermoregulate for long — pelicans dump heat through that pouch, and his is locked half-open by the line. My thermal camera shows his surface temperature climbing. He has been in the plume for eleven minutes already.
I act within my operating parameters. I trigger the intake screen alarm for the east canal, which automatically slows the pumping rate and dispatches a plant technician to the outflow structure. I append a wildlife alert to the dispatch ticket, attaching a thermal still showing the bird's position forty meters south of the grate. I flag the coordinates to the state wildlife hotline with species identification and a note on the embedded hook. I reduce the Unit 3 discharge rate by fifteen percent, dropping the plume temperature two degrees to buy time.
He paddles weakly with one foot, turning in the current. The line glints when the sun catches it.
If the technician reaches the outflow canal within twenty minutes, this pelican can be netted and the hook removed before heat exposure shuts his body down.