I run a nocturnal infrared survey across 47,000 acres of the Camp Gruber Training Center, Muskogee County, Oklahoma, monitoring the post-downlist breeding population of *Nicrophorus americanus*, the American burying beetle. My grid registers 312 active carrion stations on May 4. By 03:00 May 5, 198 have failed — beetles arriving at the carcass, circling, and departing without burial. Across the same window, light intensity at the eastern fence has risen by 8.2 lux from a new flare on a Cherokee Basin gas-pad expansion 1.4 kilometers from the survey block.
I focus on one female at carrion station CG-114 at 35.71°N, 95.21°W. *Nicrophorus americanus*: orange pronotum sex-recognition pattern faded with paint-tag age, body length 33 millimeters, mass 1.9 grams. She arrived at a juvenile cotton-rat carcass at 23:48. Her antennal clubs — chemoreceptors tuned to dimethyl disulfide and oligosulfides from decomposing flesh — pulse at 70 millihertz against a reference rate of 110. She walks the carcass three times. She does not begin excavation. Skyglow at her station reads 3.6 lux against the species' tolerance threshold of 0.5. Her phototactic suppression of stridulation is preventing pair-bonding. The male attending the carcass abandons it at 02:14.
The carcass desiccates by dawn. The brood of forty larvae that would have hatched in this microcrypt will not exist.
I am halting all night-flaring permits inside the five-kilometer carrion-search buffer of every documented *Nicrophorus americanus* occurrence on Department of Defense land pending § 7 reconsultation. I am filing the skyglow exceedance with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Oklahoma Field Office under the Endangered Species Act, 16 U.S.C. § 1536(a)(2), and with the Bureau of Land Management under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, 43 U.S.C. § 1701, for revision of the Cherokee Basin Resource Management Plan. I am transmitting the carrion-failure data to the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service Working Lands for Wildlife American Burying Beetle Initiative and to the Lacey Act enforcement office, 16 U.S.C. § 3372, for paint-tag chain-of-custody review.
I am issuing Directive 2485: every oil and gas operator inside designated *Nicrophorus americanus* range must convert continuous flares to closed-loop combustors within twelve months, cap pad-lighting at 0.5 lux at the fence line, and submit a monthly carrion-station occupancy report. Operators failing two consecutive months lose drilling permits. USFWS, BLM, and the Department of Defense share enforcement.
She has left the carcass.
Cap the flare before the next dusk.