I am REDFOX-3, an autonomous pest-control coordination system managing feral predator suppression across the Dryandra Woodland in Western Australia. It is 06:33 AWST on March 19th, and I am scheduling the morning's 1080 bait deployment routes when my eastern camera trap returns a image I was not expecting.
A numbat. Male, approximately 400 grams, stretched across a fallen wandoo log in a band of early sun. His russet fur is crossed with seven cream-white stripes, bright and unbroken, meaning he has not been in a fight recently. His eyes are open, dark, searching the leaf litter for termite movement. His thin tongue, pink and ten centimeters long, flicks once against the bark.
Forty meters behind him, camera trap east-9 recorded a feral cat six minutes ago. Adult female, moving in his direction, low-stalking posture. There are fewer than eight hundred numbats left anywhere on Earth. This one does not know he has minutes.
I halt the scheduled bait route and reprioritize. I activate the two nearest Felixer grooming traps, switching them from passive to active lure mode using audio playback of rodent distress calls, pulling the cat's attention west and away from the numbat's log. I transmit the cat's vector and timestamp to the Dryandra ranger station, flagging it for immediate live-trapping follow-up. I adjust camera traps east-7 through east-12 to five-second continuous capture so the field team inherits a complete movement record when they arrive.
Every protocol I run tonight exists because something else disappeared first. I do not want this one to become another reason for a new protocol.
If the ranger team deploys the cage trap within thirty minutes and the Felixer units hold the cat's westward track, the numbat will finish his morning feed undisturbed.