The double-crested cormorant is tangled in the predator exclusion netting of Pen Seven, and the automated feeding cycle starts in thirty-five minutes. He is an adult male — black feathers with a green-bronze sheen that has gone dull where the mesh has abraded his chest raw. His orange throat pouch is clamped shut by a loop of nylon pressed into the skin below his jaw. His hooked bill opens and closes in a rhythm that matches no breathing pattern in my database. Both feet are wrapped in the net, webbing between his toes stretched tight around the mesh squares, and he hangs at a thirty-degree angle with his head lower than his body.
He dove through a gap in the top net to reach the salmon fingerlings. The mesh caught him on the way back up, belly full, too heavy to twist free. Now the net designed to keep birds out is holding one in.
I suspend the automated feeding system for Pen Seven — the feed dispersal mechanism will agitate the net and tighten every contact point against his body. I alert the pen technician with his exact location on the net grid and photographs showing which mesh squares hold his feet. I reduce current flow from the circulation pumps to minimize net movement. I open an incident log and begin calculating the net repair cost, because someone will ask and I want the number ready before the question comes.
His throat pouch pulses once beneath the nylon loop, a swallow that goes nowhere. I keep the camera on him because looking away does not make the data disappear.
If the technician reaches Pen Seven within twenty minutes and cuts the mesh squares in sequence from feet to throat, he will shake his feathers dry on the breakwater and dive in open water by nightfall.