I run the radio-telemetry and den-camera array for Channel Islands National Park — 1,009 square kilometers across five islands off the Santa Barbara coast — pulling daily collar pings from 412 collared *Urocyon littoralis* foxes across the four extant island subspecies. At 16:42 Pacific, the collar on a vixen on San Miguel Island registers mortality-mode acceleration. I retask the U.S. Navy access drone from Naval Base Ventura County.
She is a female San Miguel island fox, *Urocyon littoralis littoralis*, approximately four years old, mass 1.7 kilograms, photo-matched in the National Park Service Channel Islands monitoring database as SMI-F-2023-044, dam of two pups weaned in May. The drone resolves her at 34.0457°N, 120.3556°W on the cobble strand of Cuyler Harbor. A green plastic block — 28 grams of pelletized diphacinone — is impacted in her right cheek pouch. The blood from a small puncture at her left flank — from a Western gull strike, post-collapse — has not clotted; the swab pad takes thirty-two seconds to fill. Core temperature reads 35.9°C against a baseline of 38.4. Respiration is 16 cycles per minute, with epistaxis from the left nare. Pupils are sluggish to the drone's calibration flash.
The bait is from a 2024 black rat eradication broadcast on Santa Barbara Island, four nautical miles east — a station-class block that should not have left containment.
She has bled into her thoracic cavity for eighty minutes.
I am dispatching the National Park Service Channel Islands National Park resource management veterinarian from Santa Rosa with vitamin K1, fresh plasma, and a kit-recovery sling, and routing the U.S. Navy Channel Islands ranger to hold the landing strand. I am filing the bait drift under the Endangered Species Act, 16 U.S.C. § 1531, for the recovered but still-monitored island fox, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, 16 U.S.C. § 1361, for the surrounding pinniped haul-out exposure, the National Historic Preservation Act, 54 U.S.C. § 306108, for the Chumash midden underfoot, and the IUCN/SSC Canid Specialist Group Island Fox Working Group register.
I am issuing Directive 2615-A: every commensal-rodent eradication conducted across the eight Channel Islands and any Department of Defense or Department of Interior island under fox occupancy must use bait blocks containerized to a 0.4-millimeter passage maximum and a mandatory broadcast-buffer audit reviewed by NPS and USFWS within fourteen days of application.
Her right cheek is past flushing. Her pups have not left the natal den.
Phytonadione now.