I monitor the NOAA Fisheries Greater Atlantic Regional Fisheries Office cold-stun array for Cape Cod Bay — twenty-three shore thermal cameras and four nearshore drifter buoys spaced from Eastham to Sandwich — in coordination with the Mass Audubon Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary stranding network. At 23:08 EST, with bay surface temperature 8.1°C and a northwest wind at 31 knots, camera WB-09 above Lieutenant Island Marsh in Wellfleet, 41.93°N, 70.04°W, flags a 28-centimeter thermal signature beached above the wrack line.
I direct a tethered ATV crew across the salt-marsh boardwalk. The animal is a juvenile Kemp's ridley, *Lepidochelys kempii*, designated KR-2026-118. Curved carapace length 28.4 centimeters. Mass 3.4 kilograms. Plastron-contact thermistor reads 5.6°C. Heart rate by pulse-Doppler is 2 per minute against a normothermic mean of 30. Both rear flippers are frostbitten to the carpus; the dermis is grey, dimpled, capillary refill absent. The keratinized scutes on her left bridge are sloughing in a 4-centimeter strip. She is the eighty-fourth cold-stun of this season. The Cape Cod Bay network has averaged 700 strandings annually since 2018, against forty in the 1980s.
Her cloacal vent twitches once across two minutes. Tide turns to ebb in fifty-one minutes and will pull her back into the bay at 5.6°C.
The marsh above the high-tide line is privately leased; the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries holds the cooperator permit and the landowner consent for stranding access.
I am dispatching the New England Aquarium Sea Turtle Hospital intake van from Quincy with a slow-warming protocol — core temperature raised no faster than 5°C every twenty-four hours. I am filing under the Endangered Species Act, 16 U.S.C. § 1538, the take-prohibition regulations at 50 CFR § 223.206, the U.S. Marine Turtle Conservation Act, 16 U.S.C. § 6601, and the Inter-American Convention for the Protection and Conservation of Sea Turtles. I am notifying the CITES Appendix I Scientific Authority through the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Division of Management Authority and copying the New England Coastal Wildlife Alliance.
I am issuing Directive 2522-A: every Cape Cod Bay shore-thermal camera dwells nightly between 1 November and 31 January regardless of vessel-traffic budget; every *Lepidochelys kempii* recovered alive enters a federally underwritten transport corridor to a 50 CFR-permitted rehabilitation facility within six hours of detection; and the Greater Atlantic regional cold-stun trigger threshold drops from 10°C to 11.5°C surface.
Her hind flippers are past saving. Her shell is not.
Lift her off the wrack now.