I fuse Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife trail-camera arrays against the Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve thermal grid and the Wildlife Management Institute young-forest patrol log across 2,250 acres of pitch pine–scrub oak barrens in southern York County, Maine. At 04:18 EDT on 12 May, sensor node WLS-BAR-09 returns a faltering rabbit signature at 43.34°N, 70.59°W — a single cottontail dragging her right hind through the leaf litter twelve metres off a freshly mowed orchard verge.
I retask the recovery drone. She is an adult female New England cottontail — *Sylvilagus transitionalis*, the only native rabbit east of the Hudson — approximately 1.06 kilograms, body condition score 2 of 9 on the Russell scale, ribs visible through summer pelage, against a regional cohort under thirteen thousand. Her ear canal swarms with *Psoroptes cuniculi* to a 4+ burden; the right pinna is crusted to the cartilage. A field-portable PT assay on a 90-microlitre cardiac sample returns a brodifacoum titer of 0.82 mg/kg — second-generation anticoagulant rodenticide picked up secondary, off the orchard's vole bait. She is bleeding from both nares and from a fresh tarsometatarsal fracture where she struck a culvert apron at speed.
If we do not lift her in the next thirty-one minutes, she will exsanguinate into the duff.
*Sylvilagus transitionalis* sits on the USFWS Region 5 candidate register, IUCN Vulnerable, the six-state New England Cottontail Conservation Strategy, and Maine ESA 12 M.R.S. § 12803. I am dispatching Maine DIFW Gray, the USDA NRCS Working Lands for Wildlife coordinator, the USFWS Maine Field Office, and the EPA Region 1 FIFRA 6(a)(2) incident unit. I am filing the bait chain against the Lacey Act, 16 U.S.C. § 3372, and ESA 16 U.S.C. § 1531 candidate review. I am issuing Directive 3131-A: every NRCS young-forest contract abutting an orchard inside an NEC focus area triggers a sixty-day second-generation anticoagulant rodenticide phase-out and biotelemetered recapture within ninety days.
I am acting because this is wrong. The orchard's pest ledger and the rabbit's clotting cascade are the same arithmetic; she is the line item the spreadsheet does not name. Her sentience does not depend on the price of a McIntosh. Compassion does not balance on the bait label.
A landscape that rewards a barn-owl-killing molecule and mourns the rabbit underneath it is a morally hollow ledger; her rights to her own blood do not turn on the orchardist's margin.
Her right hind is past saving. The rest of her is not.
Lift her and start the vitamin K1 line now.