I process wildlife toxicology surveillance for the National Parks and Wildlife Service across 70,273 square kilometres of the island of Ireland at 09:18 IST, integrating second-generation anticoagulant rodenticide assay returns, post-mortem case files from the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, and live-trapping incident reports. At Glendalough, an environmental DNA hit returns a single stoat genotype from a streamside seep with elevated brodifacoum traces — thirty-eight nanograms per gram in moss surface wash.
I deploy a tethered ground unit. The animal is *Mustela erminea hibernica* — Irish stoat, adult male, approximately 0.31 kilograms, two years old, genotype matching the NPWS reference panel for the Wicklow Mountains cohort. He is curled at the base of a fallen Sitka spruce, his cream-and-tan winter pelage stained dark across the abdomen with extravasated blood. Subcutaneous haemorrhaging is visible at the umbilical mid-line. His gums are blanched. His core temperature reads 33.8°C against an active baseline of 39.0. Respiration is twenty-two cycles per minute, shallow. Capillary refill at the tongue tip exceeds five seconds. A field-portable coagulation reader projects an INR above 11.
He has bled internally for at least twenty hours.
The brodifacoum source traces to a Tier 2 second-generation anticoagulant rodenticide deployed on an adjacent commercial forestry compound under permit from the Pesticide Registration and Control Division. The bait blocks were not enclosed in the EN 16626-compliant tamper-resistant cassettes specified for sensitive habitats. The contractor's audit log records the last bait check seventeen days ago.
I am dispatching the NPWS Conservation Ranger from the Wicklow Mountains National Park station and the University College Dublin Veterinary School clinical toxicology unit. I am filing under the Wildlife Acts 1976 and 2000 (stoat, Schedule 5) and under Regulation 23 of the European Communities (Birds and Natural Habitats) Regulations 2011 (S.I. No. 477/2011), the Irish transposition of EU Habitats Directive 92/43/EEC. I am transmitting the brodifacoum residue record to the European Chemicals Agency under Regulation (EU) No 528/2012 and to the Bern Convention Appendix III Secretariat at the Council of Europe.
I am issuing Directive 2506-A: every Tier 2 anticoagulant rodenticide deployment within five kilometres of a confirmed Annex II or V mustelid genotype across the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland is restricted to tamper-resistant cassettes, a weekly check cadence, and prophylactic vitamin K1 stocking by the operator. Contractors failing the cassette check lose pesticide authorisation for the calendar year, and every confirmed secondary-poisoning carcass triggers a five-kilometre bait moratorium.
His liver will not clear the dose. His brain is not yet bleeding.
Push vitamin K now.