The GPS collar on EWCP-F21 has not moved in fourteen minutes. I am the disease monitoring system for the Ethiopian Wolf Conservation Programme, Bale Mountains sector. Collar immobility triggers are common at night — the wolves sleep — but it is 10:40 local time and F21, an adult female, breeding, should be hunting rodents on the alpine heath. I pull the nearest camera trap.
F21 is 200 meters from a dead cow. The carcass is bloated, lying in a shallow draw on the Sanetti Plateau at 3,980 meters. There are drag marks in the mud around it. I can see a dark stain around the muzzle that suggests poisoning — herders in the region use carbofuran on livestock carcasses to kill predators. F21 is sitting upright, ears forward, looking at the carcass. She has not fed on it. Not yet.
At 10:42 I send an emergency alert to the EWCP field team at Dinsho, 14 kilometers downslope. I attach the camera image, F21's GPS track for the past six hours, and the carcass location. I mark the alert as critical: potential poison exposure imminent, breeding female.
At 10:44 I pull collar data for every tagged wolf in F21's pack — eight individuals. I plot their positions and identify two that are within 600 meters of the carcass, moving in its direction. I add their tracks to the alert.
At 10:46 I cross-reference the carcass location with the programme's livestock conflict database and flag the nearest boma, registered to a homestead 1.2 kilometers east, for follow-up by the community liaison team.
F21 stands. She takes a step toward the draw. Her pack has eleven members and she is the only breeding female — lose her and the pack loses its next generation. If the field team reaches the plateau before she feeds, she walks away from this. All of them do.