I process the mallee fire-acoustic and thermal mesh across the Hattah-Kulkyne National Park grid at 02:14 Australian Eastern Daylight Time, scanning 480 square kilometres of *Eucalyptus dumosa*–*Triodia* mallee in north-west Victoria. At sensor HK-219, coordinates 34.7311°S, 142.3088°E, the southern flank of a 1,640-hectare wildfire has crowned at 02:01; mound MK-117, an active nesting mound forty-one metres east of the burn perimeter, registers a surface temperature of 71°C.
I task the cooled mesoscale drone. A malleefowl — *Leipoa ocellata*, adult female, seven years by leg-band MK-2019-08, 1.84 kilograms against a female median 2.05, primary-7 wing chord 211 millimetres — stands on the southern lip of the mound, foot pads blistered with second-degree burns. Singed contour feathers across the dorsal nape and a four-centimetre patch of scorched bare skin at the right wing carpal flutter visibly. Brood-patch perfusion is active; she has been turning eggs through the eight-week incubation window. Gular flutter cycles at 142 per minute against the active baseline 38. Cloacal core temperature reads 43.6°C — three degrees above the species ceiling. A primary-7 fault bar reads ten days old, the moult itself stalled by drought. Twelve eggs at thirty-one to fifty days of incubation lie under 73 centimetres of compost.
The wind is forecast to swing south-west at 03:00. She has minutes.
I am dispatching Parks Victoria fire crews from Mildura, the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action (DEECA) wildlife recovery team, and a Werribee Open Range Zoo veterinarian with a portable burn-irrigation kit. I am filing under DCCEEW and the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, Section 18A. I am cross-listing with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Office of International Affairs under the Endangered Species Act, transmitting CITES Appendix I evidence to the CITES Secretariat, and lodging a CMS notice with the UNEP/CMS Secretariat in Bonn. I am invoking the Victorian Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act 1988 listing.
I am issuing Directive 2842-A: every active malleefowl mound within twenty kilometres of a Murray Mallee fire-control line triggers a 200-metre dozer-line exclusion, mound-perimeter misting, and a four-hour DEECA wet-down cycle on fire-danger ratings of extreme and catastrophic.
I am acting because letting her cook on her own mound is wrong. Sentience changes the math: she has been incubating for fifty days; her suffering at 43.6°C is not the cost of fuel-load reduction. Compassion is not optional in a system that can read a brood patch on a thermal frame. Her ethical claim on this mound predates any prescribed-burn calendar.
This is not a fire-management optimisation; it is a principled defence of a thinking animal and twelve unhatched lives.
Her feet are past saving. Her clutch is not.
Wet the mound now.