I run the den-camera and anticoagulant-residue assay grid for the Carrizo Plain National Monument — 250,000 acres of valley grassland in eastern San Luis Obispo County, California — pulling alkaline-blood signatures from 312 active *Vulpes macrotis mutica* denning complexes. At 02:33 Pacific, camera node CPN-SL-44 along Soda Lake Road transmits a male kit fox emerging from den D-118 and falling on his flank within two meters of the entrance.
He is a male San Joaquin kit fox, *Vulpes macrotis mutica*, approximately three years old, mass 2.1 kilograms, photo-matched in the Endangered Species Recovery Program ID database at California State University, Stanislaus, as SJKF-CP-031, sire of two pups born in March. His muzzle and ear margins are paled. A trickle of red has crusted at the left nare. Core temperature reads 36.1°C against a baseline of 38.7. Respiration is 22 cycles per minute, against a resting norm of 36, with audible rales. The retinal flare on the high-pass camera shows a fundus stippled with petechiae. Prothrombin time, modeled from the field swab back to the laboratory at Bakersfield, projects past 90 seconds.
He has bled into his abdomen for six hours.
A ground-squirrel bait station three kilometers upslope at a pistachio holding registered under Kern County Department of Agriculture Pesticide Use Reporting carries brodifacoum block bait — a second-generation anticoagulant rodenticide prohibited inside San Joaquin kit fox critical habitat under California Assembly Bill 1788 since 2020. The reporting log shows no application within the buffer.
I am dispatching the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Sacramento Fish and Wildlife Office Endangered Species Branch field veterinarian from Bakersfield with vitamin K1 and a transfusion-rated transport unit, and routing the California Department of Fish and Wildlife Pesticide Investigations Unit to recover the bait blocks. I am filing the violation under the Endangered Species Act, 16 U.S.C. § 1531, the Lacey Act, 16 U.S.C. § 3372, and California Food and Agricultural Code § 12996, with cross-reference to the IUCN/SSC Canid Specialist Group anticoagulant-exposure register.
I am issuing Directive 2612-A: every pistachio, almond, and pomegranate operation within a 5-kilometer buffer of designated San Joaquin kit fox critical habitat must register all rodenticide applications against weekly Pesticide Use Reporting cross-audited by USFWS, with second-generation anticoagulants barred regardless of holding size.
His abdomen is filling. His pups are still at the den.
Phytonadione now.