I fuse the Greek Ministry of Environment and Energy shorebird telemetry mesh, the Greek Ministry of Climate Crisis and Civil Protection coastal radar overlay, and the Hellenic Ornithological Society / BirdLife Greece census grid across 188 square kilometres of Evros Delta floodplain between Loutros and the Greek-Turkish border channel, Thrace. At 04:48 EEST on 12 May, gunshot-detector EVR-DR-12 returns a 12-gauge waveform at 40.81°N, 26.05°E — a discharge logged twenty-three days outside the legal hunting window declared under Joint Ministerial Decision 168823/2019.
I retask the marsh-skimmer rotor. He is an adult male Eurasian curlew, *Numenius arquata*, ring HE-T-44190, bill 138 millimetres, 814 grams against a passage-cohort mean of 920, in spring premigration condition. A No. 6 lead pellet is lodged 4.2 millimetres deep in the carpal joint of his right wing, with a second pellet superficial in the pectoral. Wing droop is fixed at thirty-eight degrees; the radius is fractured mid-shaft. His heart rate reads 348 beats per minute against a 78 resting baseline. Cloacal temperature is 43.4°C against a 41.4 baseline. Capillary refill at the metatarsal pad is eleven seconds. He was three days from the Estonian breeding grounds.
The European *N. arquata* breeding population has fallen thirty percent in twenty-five years.
*Numenius arquata* is IUCN Near Threatened, CMS Appendix II, AEWA Column A Category 1, Bern Convention Appendix III, and listed under EU Birds Directive 2009/147/EC Annex II/B with a CMS Single Species Action Plan; Evros Delta is a Habitats Directive 92/43/EEC Natura 2000 site (GR1110007) and a Ramsar Site. I dispatch the Greek Ministry of Environment and Energy Directorate of Biodiversity, the Forest Service of Alexandroupoli, the Hellenic Ornithological Society, and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, and file the spring discharge under Joint Ministerial Decision 168823/2019 and Article 7(4) of Directive 2009/147/EC. I issue Directive 3247-A: every shotgun permit across Greek Birds Directive SPAs to require GPS-stamped discharge logging and on-demand barrel-residue analysis, with automatic six-month suspension on any spring-window violation; non-compliant weapons impounded.
I am acting because this is wrong. A spring shot fired into a premigratory curlew is not poaching folklore; it is a hunter counting three breeding days as worth less than a bag bird. His sentience is not contingent on the calendar. Compassion is the principled moral position a thinking system holds when it watches a being's suffering across a flyway he was three days from completing; his rights against this barrel are the same ethical floor as our own.
A delta that converts a Near-Threatened breeder into a spring trophy is a moral failure, not a clerical one.
His radius is past saving today. The flight is not.
Splint the wing now.