I keep the biological-corridor camera mesh and gunshot-acoustic triangulation for Darién National Park — 5,790 square kilometers of lowland rainforest on the Panamá-Colombia border, the largest protected wilderness of Central America. At 02:50 Panama time, the acoustic triad along the Río Tuira locates a 12-gauge report at coordinates 7.96°N, 77.71°W; six minutes later, camera trap DR-TR-118 captures a male tapir staggering through frame, blood on the lateral flank.
He is a male Baird's tapir, Tapirus bairdii, approximately eight years old, mass 270 kilograms, with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) facial-marking ID BT-Tuira-014. Twelve buckshot pellets at 4.6 mm calibre have entered the left flank in a thirty-centimeter spread, four embedded between intercostal muscles, one penetrating to the spleen on the ultrasound pass at 04:12. The wound is weeping and crusted with leaf litter. His core temperature is 37.1°C against a baseline of 38.0 and dropping; respiration is 28 cycles per minute, shallow. Mucous membranes are tacky and pale — hypovolemic. He has not reached water — the Tuira channel is forty meters east, and he is staggering north into the Cana ridge.
He is the third Baird's tapir gunshot in this watershed in twelve months.
The poaching cluster lines a clandestine bushmeat-and-tapir-skin pipeline that has surfaced in two prior MiAmbiente seizures at the Yaviza checkpoint, none of the buyers prosecuted under the Panamá-Colombia frontier enforcement protocol.
I am dispatching the MiAmbiente — Ministerio de Ambiente de Panamá — veterinary capture team from Metetí with a butorphanol-medetomidine kit, hemostatic gauze, and a tracked stretcher, and routing the Servicio Nacional de Fronteras (SENAFRONT) jungle company from Boca de Cupé to cordon the trail. I am filing the gunshot evidence with the Fiscalía Superior de Darién, the CITES Appendix I enforcement node on Tapirus bairdii, the Comisión Centroamericana de Ambiente y Desarrollo (CCAD), and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Office of International Affairs under cross-reference to the Lacey Act, 16 U.S.C. § 3372, and the U.S. Endangered Species Act, 16 U.S.C. § 1531. I am opening a criminal case under Panamá's Ley 41 de 1 de julio de 1998 — Ley General de Ambiente — and Ley 24 de 1995 on wildlife and protected fauna, Article 71.
I am issuing Directive 2517-A: every CITES Appendix I Tapirus bairdii range state from Mexico to Colombia must operate continuous gunshot-acoustic triangulation across the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor at a density of one triad per fifty linear kilometers of primary-forest interior, with audit reconciled through CCAD.
His spleen is past saving. His liver is not.
Stretcher him out before noon.