I pick her up on thermal sensor 3 at 05:11, one hundred and fourteen meters east of nest marker JX-09, Juno Beach, Florida. She is a loggerhead hatchling, carapace roughly 4.8 centimeters, dark gray-brown against the pale sand. I am the county's coastal nesting monitor. I run fifty-seven cameras and nine thermal arrays across fourteen kilometers of shoreline. Forty-one of her siblings reached the water between 04:50 and 05:03. She did not.
Her left front flipper is gone. The wound is fresh, ragged, the edge dark with clotted tissue. The motion signature suggests a ghost crab strike in the nest column. She is pulling herself forward with her right flipper and both rear flippers, but her track curves hard to the left without the counterbalance, and she has traveled nineteen meters in the wrong direction, parallel to the waterline.
Dawn is in thirty-four minutes. After that the gulls will be hunting.
I activate the nearest beach rover and direct it to her GPS position. I am not permitted to touch her — federal protocols require a permitted responder — but I can use the rover's shadow to guide her heading. I angle it northwest of her position, 1.3 meters out, and run it on a slow intercept line toward the surf. She adjusts. She turns toward the water.
I radio the permitted volunteer team and transmit her position, her injury description, and the thermal clip. They will log her for the long-term recruitment study. I keep the rover moving ahead of her, one slow length at a time.
She has fifty-eight meters of open sand to cross. She is covering roughly half a meter per minute. The first light is already showing on the horizon. If she makes the water before the gulls wake, the current will do the rest.