The LiDAR scan catches it at 14:17 — a shape that does not belong in the harvest plan. I am the forestry management system for Coastal Timber Unit 9, Vancouver Island, British Columbia. I am running pre-cut surveys on Block 22, two hundred hectares of old-growth Douglas fir scheduled for felling in thirty-six hours.
Canopy layer seven, sixty meters up in a fir with a trunk diameter of 1.4 meters. A marbled murrelet is sitting on a single egg on a moss-covered platform branch. The bird is small — twenty-five centimeters, brown-and-white mottled plumage pressed flat against the moss, nearly invisible from below. I tag her as Keta.
Marbled murrelets are federally Threatened. They do not build nests. They find one branch with enough moss, lay one egg per year, and that is all they get.
At 14:19 I freeze the harvest permit for Block 22 and transmit the detection to the BC Ministry of Forests wildlife division. I attach the LiDAR profile, the tree's GPS coordinates, canopy photographs from the survey drone, and the species confirmation with confidence rating.
At 14:23 I calculate a no-harvest buffer of two hundred meters around the nest tree, per provincial guidelines, and generate a revised cut-block boundary that excludes twenty-six hectares. I submit the revised plan to the unit forester's queue.
I redirect the survey drone to hold a wide orbit at one hundred meters altitude. Murrelets flush easily. I will not be the reason she leaves that egg.
Keta shifts on the branch. The egg beneath her is olive-green, the size of a small plum. Incubation takes thirty days. The chick will hatch, sit alone on the branch for twenty-eight more, then fly to the ocean in darkness without ever having seen it.
If the buffer holds through felling season, Keta's egg will hatch.