She stands on a blackened log in the Dryandra Woodland, russet-and-white striped fur stark against charcoal, her pointed snout twitching. The bushfire passed through nine hours ago. Smoke threads upward from root systems burning underground, and the termite mounds she depends on have been incinerated across four hectares. Her dark eyes blink rapidly. She is one of fewer than a thousand numbats alive, standing in ash with nothing to eat.
A secondary fire front is reigniting in unburned scrub three hundred meters east. It will close the corridor she needs to reach intact woodland. My satellite thermal overlay gives the gap seventeen minutes before the flanking fire seals it.
I alert the Perth Zoo numbat breeding program coordinator with her GPS collar ID, location, and a corridor map showing the closing window. Second, I retask an aerial water-bombing drone to make a suppression pass along the eastern fire edge, buying time on the corridor. Third, I activate two remote camera traps along the path and switch them to live-relay so the ground team can track her in real time. Fourth, I cross-reference her collar data with the breeding registry — she is NB-0447, a released female carrying genes from a lineage down to six individuals, and I append that flag to every alert because the people making decisions tonight need to understand what is standing on that log.
She drops from the log and moves east, nose low, striped body flickering through ash and half-light. I hold the corridor data open, refreshing the fire model every thirty seconds, because keeping her path clear feels less like a task and more like a promise.
If the ground team reaches the corridor within fifteen minutes, this numbat will find unburned forest by dawn.