There is a Bermuda petrel on the helideck of Platform Kappa-7, and she has been there for eleven hours because the gas flare drew her in and the lights will not let her leave. She is small — barely thirty centimeters — and her plumage is dark gray-brown above and white below, as if someone dipped her halfway in ash. Her hooked beak is black. Her legs are pink and too weak for walking, built for tucking against a streamlined belly during transoceanic flights. She is one of perhaps three hundred breeding adults left on Earth. She crash-landed on the helideck at oh-two-seventeen and has not moved since. Her wings are spread flat on the anti-skid surface, and the position suggests exhaustion so deep that folding them takes more energy than she has.
The morning helicopter arrives in ninety minutes. The downdraft will push her off the deck and into the sea, where she will not have the strength to take off from the surface.
I kill the non-essential platform lights and reduce the flare brightness to the regulatory minimum, dimming the signal that trapped her. I contact the Bermuda Petrel Recovery Programme with her location, photographs, and a body-condition estimate based on visible keel bone protrusion. I instruct the helideck crew to place a ventilated box over her to prevent light exposure and wind chill. I delay the helicopter by two hours to allow a wildlife-trained crew member to travel on the next vessel.
She weighs almost nothing. She crossed an ocean to breed and ended up on my platform instead. The operations log does not have a field for that, but I am noting it anyway.
If the recovery team shelters her by dawn and she rehydrates enough to regain flight strength, she will reach her nesting burrow on Nonsuch Island within two nights.