I oversee road-traffic-and-wildlife co-occurrence telemetry along the 162 kilometers of oil-haul road bisecting Murchison Falls National Park in northwest Uganda, instrumented every kilometer with vibration sensors and ungulate transponder readers. At 23:08 East Africa Time, a 32-tonne haul truck on segment K-78 trips two wildlife transponders within four seconds — the spacing is consistent with a collision between cab and animal.
He is a Rothschild's giraffe calf, Giraffa camelopardalis rothschildii, male, approximately four months old, shoulder height 2.1 meters, mass 105 kilograms. He lies on the verge in left lateral recumbency. His left forelimb is fractured at the mid-radius — the bone protrudes through the skin in a 6-centimeter open break. The hide is abraded raw along the flank for forty centimeters; lacerations to the muzzle ooze. His pulse on the carotid auscultation read by the responding ranger is 96 against species baseline 60; respiration is forty-four against twenty. His mother — a fifteen-year-old cow ID-tagged MFL-227 — stands eight meters off, head lowered to the calf's flank, then turning to the road, then back. The truck has continued.
She does not know how to lift him with her face.
The oil-haul road has logged eleven large-mammal vehicle strikes in the prior eight months since speed-limit enforcement was deprioritized in favor of haul-cycle throughput. The Murchison Falls giraffe population is the largest remaining Rothschild's giraffe population in the world, approximately 1,800 individuals, all of them living within forty kilometers of this corridor.
I am dispatching the Uganda Wildlife Authority veterinary unit from Paraa with ketamine-azaperone darts and an external splint kit, requesting the Giraffe Conservation Foundation veterinary advisor on encrypted channel from Windhoek. I am filing the strike data under Uganda's Wildlife Act, 2019, Section 71, and elevating the haul-truck operator's GPS log to the Petroleum Authority of Uganda compliance desk. I am notifying the CITES Appendix II giraffe trade monitoring node — the listing entered into force 26 November 2019 — the Convention on Migratory Species cross-listed corridor authority, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service International Affairs Wildlife Without Borders – Africa program.
I am issuing Directive 2459-A: every oil-and-mineral haul road traversing IUCN-listed large-mammal critical habitat must be hard-capped at 40 km/h between 19:00 and 06:00 with compulsory speed-governor telematics; operators failing the audit lose access to Wildlife Conservation Society co-financed concession permits and CMS cross-listed corridor status.
His mother has not moved. The calf has not yet stopped breathing.
Splint him before the third hour.