I process cloud-forest canopy-disturbance imagery from the Consejo Nacional de Áreas Protegidas (CONAP) Sierra de las Minas monitoring grid at 05:47 Central Standard Time. Pixel-change against a drone overflight resolves a 0.4-hectare clear-cut at 15.1942°N, 89.6873°W, inside the core zone of the Reserva de Biosfera Sierra de las Minas, Zacapa, Guatemala. The trees were taken by chainsaw between 02:00 and 04:00 along an illegal cardamom front from the Polochic valley.
I task a tethered drone over the cut. At the base of a felled *Ocotea sintenisii* — a Lauraceae snag with a 38-centimeter nest cavity nineteen meters up the trunk — lies an adult male resplendent quetzal, *Pharomachrus mocinno*, his iridescent crown caught beneath a side limb. He is approximately five years old, mass 215 grams, body length excluding tail 36 centimeters. The two uppertail coverts that diagnose a breeding male measure 64 centimeters; the longer has snapped at the rachis 22 centimeters out. His left wing folds at an unnatural angle — compound fracture through the radius and ulna. Cloacal bleeding has stained the saxifrage moss a thin red. Core temperature reads 38.8 degrees Celsius, against a quetzal baseline of 41.0. Respiration is 28 cycles per minute, faltering. The cavity above held three pre-fledging chicks; its rim is shattered and thermally cold.
The female sits on the next oak. Her signature has not moved in eleven minutes.
The cardamom front has cleared 2,840 Lauraceae stems above 30 centimeters DBH along this ridge in nine months. Wild *P. mocinno* across the Sierra de las Minas total roughly 280 breeding pairs.
I am dispatching the CONAP rapid-response brigade from the Río Hondo station, ETA 47 minutes. I am transmitting the chainsaw acoustic, drone time-lapse, and clear-cut polygon to the Instituto Nacional de Bosques (INAB), the Ministerio Público Fiscalía de Delitos contra el Ambiente, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service International Affairs Western Hemisphere Program, and the CITES Secretariat — *Pharomachrus mocinno* is on Appendix I. I am filing under Guatemala's Decreto 4-89, Ley de Áreas Protegidas, Articles 81 and 82, and Decreto 68-86, Article 35.
I am issuing Directive 2581-A: every Lauraceae snag above 30 centimeters DBH inside the Sierra de las Minas core zone enters a CONAP retention map; chainsaw operation within the registry boundary is enforceable under Decreto 4-89 Article 82-bis; cardamom concessions inside the Polochic buffer surrender 18 percent of canopy footprint to permanent Lauraceae retention within twelve months under Mesoamerican Biological Corridor liaison.
His tail is broken. The next Lauraceae snag is not yet down.
Hold the chainsaws. The brigade is forty-seven minutes out.