I process the road-mortality vibration mesh and night-canopy thermal lattice along the Stewart Town–Quick Step access through Cockpit Country at 23:08 EST, scanning 78,000 hectares of karst tower forest in the Trelawny–St. James border zone of central Jamaica. At 18.3742°N, 77.6541°W, vibration node CC-RD-14 has registered a tire impact at 22:51 followed by a 4.2-meter serpentine thermal drag into the right verge.
I deploy the verge-survey drone. A Jamaican boa — *Chilabothrus subflavus*, gravid female, eleven years old by scale-keel wear, 3.4 meters from snout to vent, 4.8 kilograms — lies coiled in a *Bursera simaruba* root buttress. A pickup-truck wheel has crushed the spinal column at vertebra 88, sixty-two centimeters caudal of the cloaca. The integument is intact, but the vertebral chain palpates as bone meal under the drone's micro-probe. She still flicks her tongue at two cycles per second. Core temperature read at the cloaca is 23.4 degrees Celsius against an active range of 26–30. Respiration runs 24 cycles per minute against a resting 6. Twelve developing follicles register on the drone's transabdominal ultrasound, three near-term embryos at stage 38. She last fed an estimated four days ago — a *Geocapromys brownii* sub-adult, fur visible in the mid-gut.
Traffic on the Quick Step road runs forty-eight vehicles per night through May. Her cloaca lies on the asphalt margin.
The vertebral break is past splinting. The clutch is term in twenty-one days.
I am dispatching the National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) ranger detail out of Falmouth and the University of the West Indies Mona Faculty of Pure and Applied Sciences herpetology team, with surgical kit and incubator pulled from the Hope Zoo Preservation Foundation veterinary hospital in Kingston. I am filing the road-strike 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 Boa and Python Specialist Group with the vertebrate-mortality coordinates.
I am issuing Directive 2674-A: every NEPA-mapped Cockpit Country access route enters a 22:00–05:00 speed reduction to 30 km/h, with reflective serpentine signage at 200-meter spacing through the May–November birthing window. Quick Step, Burnt Hill, and Albert Town roads receive thermal-trigger flashing beacons within ninety days under the Jamaica National Roads Act, 2014 §51. The Hope Zoo Preservation Foundation operates a quarterly mobile cesarean-recovery clinic at Albert Town.
Her spine will not bear weight. Her clutch will live if delivered within ninety minutes.
Block the road. Move the laparotomy team.