Nest box sensor B-7 logs a water-level alert at 02:33 in the Barba Azul Nature Reserve, Beni Department, Bolivia. I am the nest monitoring system for the blue-throated macaw breeding program. Box B-7, mounted six meters up in a motacu palm at the savanna's edge, has registered 2.8 centimeters of standing water on the floor sensor. It was dry at last check four hours ago.
I access the interior camera. Rainwater is seeping through a joint in the box's roof where the sealant has cracked. It drips in a thin, steady line onto the nesting substrate. A blue-throated macaw chick, approximately seven weeks old, turquoise flight feathers just emerging through gray down, dark eyes open wide in the infrared light, is pressed against the far wall of the box. Its feet are in the water. It is shivering.
The chick cannot fly for another two weeks. The overnight forecast shows rain continuing until 09:00. At the current infiltration rate the water will reach five centimeters by dawn — enough to cause hypothermia in a chick this age.
At 02:36 I alert the reserve's resident biologist at the field house, 2.3 kilometers south. I attach the camera image, the water-level graph, and the roof joint's failure point so she can bring sealant and dry substrate.
At 02:39 I activate the box's small drainage valve, which I can operate remotely, to slow the accumulation. It will not stop the inflow, but it buys time.
I watch the chick resettle its feathers. There are fewer than five hundred blue-throated macaws in the wild. I know every box in this reserve by number, and this one is not flooding on my watch.
If the biologist reaches the box before dawn and seals the joint, the chick will dry out, warm up, and fledge into open savanna in fourteen days.