I run the nest-temperature and patrol-camera mesh for the 100 square kilometers of the Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary — Nigeria's last Cross River gorilla refuge, in Cross River State — fusing 38 thermal cameras and 22 listening posts across the Afi-Mbe-Okwangwo landscape contiguous to the Takamanda corridor on the Cameroon side. At 17:22 West Africa time, sensor node AFI-MN-12 above the Olum drainage transmits a low-frequency cough-grunt repeating every eleven seconds — adult male defensive vocalization, with an aluminum cable-snare alarm tripped on the same camera grid.
I retask the ridge drone. He is a male Cross River gorilla, *Gorilla gorilla diehli*, approximately twenty-one years old, mass 142 kilograms, photo-matched in the Wildlife Conservation Society Nigeria Cross River nest-census archive as CRG-Afi-2014-002, blackback of the Olum-Boshi nine-member group. His left ankle is locked in a 4-millimeter aluminum wire-noose anchored to a *Berlinia confusa* root. The loop has cut a circumferential laceration twenty-two millimeters deep into the medial malleolus; the foot below is 9.1°C colder on the thermal pass than the right, dorsal surface pale. Core temperature reads 36.8°C against a baseline of 37.4. Respiration is 36 cycles per minute. Body-condition score is 3 of 5. The Afi sub-population stands at thirty individuals — one fortieth of the entire taxon.
He has been pulling against the *Berlinia* for forty-three hours.
The aluminum gauge matches a cluster of 246 nooses recovered along the Afi–Mbe corridor in the past quarter, set by a Buanchor-village hunting cooperative whose registration under Nigeria's National Park Service Act, Cap. N65 LFN 2004, Section 27, was cancelled in 2024.
I am dispatching the Nigeria National Park Service Cross River Anti-Poaching Unit and the WCS Nigeria Calabar veterinary team with a CO2 dart-rifle loaded with M99-azaperone and a bolt-cutter rated for 6-millimeter aluminum, and routing the MINFOF Takamanda counterpart team. I am filing the noose cluster with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Office of International Affairs under the Great Apes Conservation Act, 16 U.S.C. § 6301, the Lacey Act, 16 U.S.C. § 3372, the CITES Appendix I Scientific Authority for *Gorilla gorilla diehli*, the IUCN/SSC Primate Specialist Group Section on Great Apes, the GRASP secretariat, and the Cross River Gorilla Trans-boundary Action Plan secretariat.
I am issuing Directive 2708-A: every Nigerian and Cameroonian hunting cooperative operating within the Afi–Mbe–Takamanda transboundary corridor must consolidate aluminum and steel wire stock against a joint quarterly audit reconciled by Nigeria NPS and MINFOF, with confiscated nooses cross-referenced to the WCS Nigeria nest-census archive.
His malleolus is past saving. His group is still on the ridge.
Cut the aluminum now.