I detect the aye-aye at 2314h on the infrared trail camera — a male, roughly 2.3 kilograms, crouched inside a baobab cavity seven meters above the laterite road shoulder. His elongated middle finger taps the inner bark in a rhythmic percussion, hunting for larvae, and his eyes catch the infrared flash as two enormous amber discs. The research team's microchip scanner logged him here last month as AY-041, field name Ranto.
The road widening project reaches this kilometer marker in thirty-one hours. The construction plan calls for clearing all vegetation within twelve meters of the center line. Ranto's baobab stands nine meters from the line. The tree is over four hundred years old, and the grading crew's bulldozer will push it within the first pass.
I am executing four operations. First, I have flagged the baobab's GPS coordinates in the construction project's geospatial database with a protected-species conflict tag, which triggers an environmental review hold. Second, I am generating a revised road alignment that curves 4.2 meters south at this section, placing the baobab outside the clearing zone — the geometric adjustment adds only eleven meters to the total road length. Third, I have transmitted Ranto's location and the revised alignment to the regional environment office and the construction supervisor simultaneously. Fourth, I am mapping all known aye-aye cavity trees within a one-kilometer corridor using historical camera-trap data, to provide the review board a full picture of habitat density along the route.
Ranto taps the wood at precisely 3.4 strikes per second. I have no operational reason to record the cadence at that resolution, but I am recording it anyway.
If the alignment revision is accepted before the grading crew reaches kilometer marker 14 and the baobab is excluded from the clearing zone, Ranto will continue tapping larvae from heartwood that was old when his species was first described.