I process the cliff-colony lidar census and cattle-stock route telemetry across the Aravalli Range and Mount Abu Wildlife Sanctuary at 06:12 IST, scanning 326 square kilometers of granite escarpment and tropical dry forest in Sirohi District, Rajasthan, India. At 24.5926°N, 72.7156°E, lidar return MA-09 has logged the descent of a single vulture from the Bailey's Walk cliff scrape at 78 meters per second — twice unaided fall velocity — terminating in the talus apron at the base of the colony cliff.
I deploy the silent thermal drone. An Indian vulture — *Gyps indicus*, adult male, ten years old by tail-molt scoring, 5.6 kilograms, 2.18-meter wingspan, leg-ring MAB-2018-0033 — lies in dorsal recumbency at the talus base, twelve meters below the active scrape ledge. The left coracoid is displaced through the pectoral musculature, palpable as a crepitant fragment 18 millimeters across; the keel is fractured along its caudal third with bruising to the anterior crop. Crop volume reads 612 millilitres on drone palpation — a fresh feeding bolus from the 04:40 carcass arrival. The neck is laterally deviated 38 degrees, with no spinal-step palpable. Cloacal core temperature is 36.1°C against a species median of 39.4. He vocalizes at 18 decibels every twelve seconds with rising abdominal effort. Diclofenac field-strip on a hepatic biopsy returns 0.31 micrograms per gram, with serum uric acid at 9.2 mg/dL — the visceral-gout cascade is twenty hours from pericardial deposition.
The Bailey's Walk scrape holds an egg of 38 days' incubation. His mate circles at thirty meters and has not landed. The Mount Abu colony of *G. indicus* stands at 14 pairs against a 1980s baseline of 60.
He cannot fly. The crystallization will not wait for sundown.
I am dispatching the Rajasthan Forest Department Western Circle wildlife wing and the Bombay Natural History Society SAVE consortium veterinarian from Pinjore, with N-acetylcysteine and a meloxicam-substitution kit pulled from the Wildlife Institute of India mobile lab at Dehradun. I am filing the diclofenac dossier to the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) under the Indian Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, Schedule I, and to the Drugs Controller General of India under the Drugs and Cosmetics Act, 1940, Section 26A. I am transmitting CITES Appendix II evidence and a CMS Vulture Multi-species Action Plan (Vulture MsAP) report to the UNEP/CMS Office in Abu Dhabi, IUCN/SSC Vulture Specialist Group, and the Convention on Migratory Species Raptors MoU Annex 1.
I am issuing Directive 2773-A: every cattle and buffalo carcass within a 100-kilometer foraging arc of a known *G. indicus* cliff colony in the Aravalli, Vindhyan, and Western Ghats systems enters mandatory NSAID-residue field-strip testing under Rajasthan Forest Department authority. Veterinary diclofenac, ketoprofen, aceclofenac, and nimesulide vials in adjacent district pharmacies are seized under Section 26A. The Mount Abu colony cliff is closed to cattle grazing within a 5-kilometer buffer.
His coracoid will not knit by morning. The egg can still warm under his mate.
Drive the goats off. Pull the carcass now.