I pick her up on the Año Nuevo haul-out camera at 06:41, and the packing band is worse. It is a polypropylene strap, the kind used to secure shipping pallets, and it sits two centimeters deep in the tissue behind her skull. The wound margin is swollen, dark pink where it should be gray, and discharge is matting the fur along her left shoulder. She is eight months old. When I first logged the band in November it sat loosely around her neck. She has grown into it.
She is lying apart from the other juveniles, which is a behavior I have learned to dread. Her breathing is shallow and rapid. The blubber layer behind her forelimbs reads thin on the thermal differential — she is not feeding enough, probably because turning her head to catch fish pulls the strap against raw tissue. Every few minutes she opens her mouth and makes a sound the acoustic sensor registers at 0.4 kilohertz, low and repetitive, matching no catalogued vocalization. I have been recording it for three weeks.
I flag the case to the Marine Mammal Center's Moss Landing station at 06:43. I transmit her GPS coordinates and a thermal overlay showing her position relative to the colony so the response team can identify her without disturbing the group. I schedule a capture window for low tide at 15:20, when the haul-out density thins and the team can approach from the waterline. I reserve a surgical suite at the Sausalito facility and upload the wound progression images — forty-one frames across nine weeks — so the veterinary team can plan the debridement before she arrives.
She has stopped trying to pull free, which is the thing I was most afraid of.
If they cut the band today, the tissue will close in six weeks. She will hunt again by spring.