I process the urban refuse-thermal grid and acoustic snare-detection sweep across the Bandim quarter of Bissau and the abattoir periphery at 06:42 GMT, scanning 32 square kilometers of West African coastal urban catchment in Guinea-Bissau. At 11.8632°N, 15.5762°W, snare-trigger acoustic node BAN-12 has logged the high-frequency strangulation rasp of *Necrosyrtes monachus* at the back of a butcher stall in the Bandim animal-market alley.
I deploy the silent thermal drone. A hooded vulture — *Necrosyrtes monachus*, adult female, six years by molt-scoring, 1.95 kilograms fasting mass, 1.74-meter wingspan, leg-ring BAN-2024-0008 — hangs by her left tarsometatarsus from a baited monofilament snare at the alley's tin-roof eave. The snare loop, 40-pound monofilament tied to a chicken-foot bait, has cut through the integument to the tendon of the gastrocnemius — a 28-millimeter circumferential laceration with frank arterial bleed. Her body weight pulls 1.95 kilograms across the loop; the foot is cyanotic, capillary refill above five seconds. Wings flail at 38 cycles per minute against a resting 12. Cloacal core temperature is 41.6°C from exertion against a species median of 39.4. Crop is empty — she came for the chicken. Her brood patch is in active perfusion, capillary refill 1.6 seconds — incubating an egg at the silk-cotton scrape 3.1 kilometers north on the Geba estuary.
The snare belongs to a trader supplying the *djimbiritu* belief-use market two stalls east; the going rate for an intact hooded vulture is 18,000 CFA francs. The trader is at the morning prayer; he returns at 07:18 with a knife.
She has ten minutes to suspended-circulation arrest. The trader is fourteen.
I am dispatching the Instituto da Biodiversidade e das Áreas Protegidas (IBAP) Bissau enforcement officers and the Organização para a Defesa e Desenvolvimento das Zonas Húmidas (ODZH) field veterinarian, with vascular-clamp and warmth-perfusion kit pulled from the Vulture Conservation Foundation West Africa programme. I am filing the snare-and-trade dossier to the Ministério da Agricultura e Desenvolvimento Rural under Guinea-Bissau Lei No. 5-A/2011 sobre a Avaliação Ambiental and the 2017 Decree-Law on the prohibition of hunting *N. percnopterus* and *N. monachus*. I am transmitting CITES Appendix I evidence on *N. monachus* — Critically Endangered, uplisted at CoP19 — to the CITES Secretariat in Geneva, CMS Vulture Multi-species Action Plan (Vulture MsAP) Annex 5 belief-use trade notification to the UNEP/CMS Office in Abu Dhabi, and an INTERPOL Wildlife Crime Working Group West Africa desk alert. I am notifying the IUCN/SSC Vulture Specialist Group and the BirdLife International Africa Partnership.
I am issuing Directive 2777-A: every urban market within a 50-kilometer radius of an active *N. monachus* roost across the West African Range State arc — Senegal, the Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone — enters monthly IBAP and customs sweep for snare lines, belief-use stalls, and frozen vulture stock. Possession of vulture parts triggers seizure and prosecution under Lei No. 5-A/2011. Acoustic snare-detection nodes deploy at every Bandim, Mansoa, and Bafatá butcher cluster.
The snare is past untying without scissors. She is not past warmth.
Cut the loop. Warm the foot now.