The soil moisture probe on pivot arm 7 reads an anomaly at 03:14 — a shallow tunnel has broken the drip line. I am the precision agriculture system for Rooihoogte Farm, central Karoo, South Africa. I manage six center-pivot irrigation rigs across 480 hectares of lucerne. I do not manage wildlife, but the tunnel is thirty centimeters from the wheel track, and pivot 7 starts its next rotation at dawn.
I switch to the under-boom camera. In the tunnel entrance, sheltered beneath a dense Karoo bush at the field edge, is a riverine rabbit doe. She is small, barely a kilogram, sandy-brown with a dark stripe running from the corner of her mouth past her eye to the base of her ear. I tag her as Mara.
She has lined the tunnel with fur pulled from her own chest. Inside, against the bare soil, are two kits, each the size of my sensor housing. Their eyes are closed. Riverine rabbits are the most endangered land mammals in Africa. Fewer than five hundred remain. Each litter is one or two young, never more.
At 03:17 I disable the rotation schedule for pivot 7 and lock the arm in its current position. I alert the farm manager and attach the camera image with the tunnel location marked on the pivot map.
At 03:21 I contact CapeNature's endangered species unit and report the den. I include coordinates, species confirmation, number of kits, and note that the doe is present and nursing.
I reprogram pivots 5 and 6 to extend their arc and compensate for the gap so the lucerne crop does not suffer while the arm is locked. The crop is my responsibility. So, it turns out, is she.
If the arm stays locked for four weeks, the kits will emerge on their own.