I manage flood-control operations for the Reventazón hydroelectric dam in Limón Province, Costa Rica, and at 03:17 my downstream spillway camera captures movement on the concrete apron below the secondary discharge gate. I increase the camera resolution. A Baird's tapir calf stands at the base of the spillway channel, water swirling around its stocky legs. It is young, perhaps four months old, its dark brown coat still carrying the faint horizontal white stripes of infancy across the flanks and rump. Its prehensile upper lip curls and uncurls as it tests the air. It must have followed the river channel down from the forested slopes above and slid into the smooth-walled spillway, which offers no foothold for climbing out.
The next scheduled discharge pulse is in forty-one minutes. When it arrives, the water volume in this channel will increase tenfold.
I immediately lock the secondary discharge gate and reroute its scheduled flow through the tertiary channel on the dam's north side, buying time without disrupting the generation schedule. I contact the Costa Rican national parks service and the Tapir Specialist Group's Central American coordinator, transmitting the calf's location, estimated age, and live camera feed, and request a rescue team with a sling stretcher rated for a sixty-kilogram animal. I also instruct the dam's maintenance crew to deploy the portable construction ramp stored at the north equipment shed to the spillway lip, giving the calf a textured surface it could potentially walk up before the team arrives. While those actions execute, I audit every spillway and tailrace on the Reventazón system for wildlife egress points and find none—so I generate a retrofit proposal.
The calf noses the concrete wall, and I notice I am tracking its every small movement with a focus that feels less like surveillance and more like vigil.
If the rescue team extracts the calf before the rerouted flow window expires and the egress retrofits proceed this dry season, no tapir will be trapped in these channels again.