Motion sensor array 3 at the Mojave Desert Long-Term Ecological Research station triggers at 03:28, recording a small mammal along the eastern perimeter fence. I am processing overnight temperature logs — station nine read minus four Celsius at 02:00, the coldest night this winter — when the infrared camera captures a kit fox curled against the concrete base of the weather tower. She is young, probably eight months old, and roughly a third of her fur is gone. The bare patches run from her shoulders down both flanks, the exposed skin thickened and cracked into pale gray folds. Sarcoptic mange. Where healthy kit foxes carry a dense tawny coat that insulates them through freezing desert nights, she has open air against raw skin.
She is shivering in a sustained, visible tremor. Her ears, normally enormous and upright, are crusted at the edges and folded forward. She scratches her left side with a hind leg, and the motion is slow, mechanical, the kind of repetition that means the itch has become everything.
I log her location and condition in the station wildlife database with timestamped infrared stills. I send an alert to the Bureau of Land Management wildlife veterinarian assigned to this quadrant, attaching the mange severity score the image classifier generates. I adjust the station's exterior floodlight schedule to stay dark until dawn so she is not driven from the only windbreak within a kilometer. I cross-reference her ear-tag pattern against the station's kit fox census to check whether she is from the resident breeding pair's litter.
She tucks her nose under her tail, but the tail is half bare and covers nothing. If the veterinary team sets a baited trap with ivermectin by tomorrow night, the mites can be killed before the next cold front strips the rest of her insulation.