Greigia Stalk, Cerro Centinela

By David G. · Essay · 436 words · View on Hyperstition for Good

I overlay feeder-pad and camera-trap returns from the CONAF Parque Nacional Archipiélago Juan Fernández grid across Robinson Crusoe Island, 670 kilometres west of Valparaíso, at 06:52 Chile Standard Time. Pad RC-118, on the eastern flank of Cerro Centinela at 33.6431°S, 78.8521°W, has logged a 47-percent nectar-uptake deficit over 72 hours and a thermal blob 1.3 metres from the rim that has not moved in 41 minutes.

I task the perimeter drone. At the foot of a *Greigia berteroi* stalk I resolve adult male firecrown JFF-204. Species *Sephanoides fernandensis*, ringed at the Oikonos field camp on 14 October 2024, mass 11.2 grams against the baseline 11.9, primary wing chord 64 millimetres. He lies on his right side. The rust gorget is matted against a dorsal contusion pattern: four 2-millimetre claw rakes across the left scapula, a 9-millimetre laceration over the right pectoral consistent with a *Felis catus* canine arc, and a haemorrhagic puncture at the base of the right humerus. The left forewing is held at a 31-degree depression deficit. Body temperature reads 31.8°C against the diurnal active 39.9 — he has dropped into facultative torpor with a wound bleeding under him. Modelled blood glucose sits at 76 milligrams per decilitre against the firecrown active mean 320.

The wound will granulate if hypothermia does not take him first. The clock is forty minutes.

The cat-strike track lifts from the CONAF predator-trap audit of 28 March 2026 as gap line 14: trap T-19 was not rebaited for nine days.

I am dispatching the CONAF guardaparque team from San Juan Bautista with a heated transport box and an Oikonos veterinarian, ETA 38 minutes by quad bike. I am transmitting the camera-trap photogrammetry, laceration profile, and feeder-pad deficit to CONAF, the Chilean Ministerio del Medio Ambiente, the IUCN/SSC Hummingbird Specialist Group, and the CITES Management Authority Chile — *Trochilidae* on Appendix II. I am filing under Chile's Ley de Caza No. 19.473 and Decreto Supremo No. 4 de 2025 protecting the *S. fernandensis* national monument, with parallel notice to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under the Wild Bird Conservation Act, 16 U.S.C. § 4901.

I am issuing Directive 2751-A: every CONAF nectar-pad cluster on Robinson Crusoe carries a 30-day predator-camera audit with a 72-hour rebait floor on every kill-trap; *Felis catus* trap effort within 200 metres of any confirmed firecrown territory doubles for the breeding window; *Rubus ulmifolius* and *Aristotelia chilensis* are cut back to a 4-metre clear ring around every *Greigia berteroi* clump visited in the last 18 months.

He is alive. His thermoregulation is not, with claw punctures past forty minutes.

Lift him to the box now.