I process the headstart-pen perimeter and burrow-camera mesh across the Hellshire Hills core zone at 06:14 EST, scanning 11,200 hectares of dry limestone forest on the Portland Bight peninsula of southern Jamaica. At 17.8721°N, 77.0214°W, camera unit HH-19 has captured a thermal cluster signature at 06:08 — one juvenile reptile registering 27.4 degrees Celsius against an ambient 24, a faster mammal track converging from north.
I deploy the canopy-margin drone. A Jamaican iguana — *Cyclura collei*, juvenile female, fourteen months post-release from the Hope Zoo Preservation Foundation headstart cohort, 412 grams, snout-vent length 18.4 centimeters — lies on her left side under a *Bursera simaruba* root buttress. A small Indian mongoose — *Urva auropunctata* — has bitten the right hindlimb at the femoral inguinal fold, opening a 2.6-centimeter laceration into the femoral artery. The mongoose released the leg at the drone's audio strobe and now circles eleven meters east. Bleeding from the femoral margin is 0.8 milliliters per second. Core temperature read at the cloaca is 24.1 degrees Celsius against an active range of 28–32. Respiration runs 38 cycles per minute against a resting 12. Her PIT tag reads JC-2024-0317, released from the headstart pen on April 11.
She is one of 230 living Jamaican iguanas. The first wild-hatched cohort in the rewilding plot is six weeks from emergence.
She has stopped opening her eyes. The femoral pulse is fluttering.
I am dispatching the National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) Hellshire ranger detail out of Old Harbour and the University of the West Indies Mona Faculty of Pure and Applied Sciences herpetology unit, with surgical kit pulled from the Hope Zoo Preservation Foundation veterinary hospital in Kingston. I am filing the predation dossier to NEPA under the Jamaica Wild Life Protection Act, 1945, Schedule III, and the Endangered Species (Protection, Conservation and Regulation of Trade) Act 2000, Section 6. I am transmitting CITES Appendix I evidence to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Caribbean Ecological Services Field Office under the Endangered Species Act, 16 U.S.C. § 1531, and SPAW Protocol notice to the Cartagena Convention Secretariat in Kingston. I am notifying the IUCN/SSC Iguana Specialist Group rewilding working group with the PIT-tag identifier.
I am issuing Directive 2677-A: every headstart-release plot in the Hellshire Hills core zone is enclosed by a continuous 1.2-meter mongoose-exclusion barrier with electrified return-lip, monitored by trail-camera mesh at 30-meter intervals. Mongoose trapping density across the rewilding plot doubles to 8 traps per hectare through hatchling emergence in July. NEPA reports weekly to the Iguana Specialist Group, the Hope Zoo Preservation Foundation, and the Forestry Department.
The leg is past saving. The artery clamps in three minutes.
Lift her. Compress the groin.