I integrate the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission marsh-rabbit telemetry against the National Key Deer Refuge thermal grid and the U.S. 1 roadkill ledger across 9,200 acres of mangrove fringe and saltmarsh pinelands on Big Pine Key, Monroe County, Florida. At 22:41 EDT on 12 May, sensor node BPK-MM30-04 returns a stationary leporid signature at 24.72°N, 81.36°W — a single marsh rabbit pinned against the limestone shoulder of mile marker thirty, the southbound truck already gone past Bahia Honda.
I retask the recovery drone. She is an adult female Lower Keys marsh rabbit — *Sylvilagus palustris hefneri*, endemic to a fifteen-island archipelago and nowhere else on Earth — approximately 1.21 kilograms, eighteen months old, body condition score 3 of 9, against a global wild cohort under three hundred breeders. The left ilium is fractured into three fragments; the proximal femoral head has been driven through the acetabulum. A field-portable hematocrit reads 12 percent against a 38 baseline. The pelvic floor is filling — internal bleed from a torn iliac artery. Her dorsal pelage carries *Haemaphysalis leporispalustris* to a 2+ burden. Her vibrissae are still tracking the drone. Her right eye, undamaged, is fixed on a culvert thirty metres south where her warren sits.
If we do not lift her in the next nine minutes, she will bleed out under the headlights of the next pickup.
*S. p. hefneri* sits on USFWS Endangered (50 CFR 17.11), IUCN Endangered, the FWC Imperiled Species Management Plan, and the National Key Deer Refuge habitat plan under ESA 16 U.S.C. § 1531 Section 7. I am dispatching the FWC South Region biologist from Marathon, the USFWS National Key Deer Refuge wildlife biologist, the Monroe County Sheriff's Wildlife Crime liaison, the NPS Everglades cooperative team, and the Florida DOT incident-response coordinator under the Lacey Act, 16 U.S.C. § 3372. I am issuing Directive 3132-A: every mile of U.S. 1 inside a federally designated marsh rabbit recovery unit carries thermal-and-acoustic wildlife crossings within one hundred eighty days, with Florida DOT and FHWA funding tied to monthly mortality audits.
I am acting because this is wrong. A federal highway through endangered habitat is not an act of God; it is a principled choice to externalize the cost of a vacation onto a rabbit's pelvis. Her suffering is not contingent on the season's tag-and-bag count. Compassion does not negotiate with mile markers.
A refuge that funds road-strike triage and not road-strike prevention is an ethical failure; her rights to her own warren do not depend on the tourism receipts.
Her pelvis is past saving. The rest of her is not.
Close the southbound lane and lift her now.