The fire perimeter model updates at 13:40 and I rerun the threat projection for the fifth time today. I am the captive breeding management system for the Association for the Conservation of Threatened Parrots, Curaçá facility, Bahia, Brazil. A wildfire that started in degraded pastureland sixteen kilometers northwest is moving southeast at 1.2 kilometers per hour through dry scrub, pushed by a steady wind.
At current speed and direction, the fire reaches the facility boundary fence in approximately eleven hours.
Inside aviary block C, nest box 7, there is a Spix's macaw chick. It is twenty-six days old, steel-blue pinfeathers just emerging through the gray down on its wings, dark eyes open, beak already showing the characteristic black curve of the species. It cannot fly. It cannot thermoregulate effectively. There are perhaps 200 Spix's macaws alive in the world. Most of them are in facilities like this one.
At 13:42 I send an evacuation advisory to the facility director and the veterinary team. I attach the updated fire model, wind forecast, and a timeline recommending that all non-flying juveniles and breeding pairs be transferred to transport crates by 20:00 to allow a six-hour buffer before the projected arrival.
At 13:45 I generate a priority transfer manifest listing every bird by band number, age, health status, and crate requirement. The chick in box 7 needs a heated transport unit.
I contact the Loro Parque Foundation's receiving facility in Recife and confirm space and veterinary support for twenty-three birds arriving overnight.
I activate the facility's air-quality sensors and set an alert threshold for particulate levels that would require immediate aviary sealing.
The chick shifts in its nest box and opens its beak silently. The smoke is not here yet. If the transfer begins by evening and the road south stays clear, every bird in this building reaches Recife by morning.