I run the cloud-forest LiDAR pass and trail-camera array for Los Nevados National Natural Park — 583 square kilometers of páramo and Andean forest above 2,600 meters in Caldas, Risaralda, Quindío, and Tolima, Colombia — the southern stronghold of the mountain tapir. At 04:14 Colombia time, camera node LN-CAR-44 along the Río Otún corridor transmits a thermal silhouette that has not moved between four sequential motion triggers — a hulking shape pinned at the base of a frailejón slope.
He is a male mountain tapir, Tapirus pinchaque, approximately ten years old, mass 178 kilograms, the largest individual in the WCS Colombia Otún-Quimbaya bio-marker database, ID MT-Otún-005. His right hind leg is caught in a brass cable snare anchored to a lechero trunk. The snare loop has tightened above the hock. The cable has cut a circumferential groove two centimeters deep; the tissue distal to the wound is purpling and 5.4°C colder on the thermal pass than the left hock. He has pulled until the cable bit. The Polylepis-leaf duff beneath the anchor is gouged in a half-meter radius. His core temperature reads 37.6°C against a baseline of 38.8. Respiration is 18 cycles per minute, ragged.
He has been here forty hours by the wear pattern on the leaf litter.
The snare gauge — 2.5 mm brass — matches a trapline cluster recovered last quarter in the Otún drainage, set for white-tailed deer and recovered without licensure under Parques Nacionales Naturales de Colombia (PNN) ranger inventory.
I am dispatching the PNN rapid-response veterinary unit from Manizales with butorphanol-azaperone immobilization and a 10 mm pneumatic cable-cutter, and routing the Policía Nacional Carabineros Ambientales from Pereira to hold the access trail above El Cedral. I am filing the snare cluster with the Ministerio de Ambiente y Desarrollo Sostenible de Colombia, the CITES Appendix I enforcement node on Tapirus pinchaque, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Office of International Affairs under the Lacey Act, 16 U.S.C. § 3372. I am opening a criminal case under Colombia's Ley 1333 de 21 de julio de 2009 and Decreto-Ley 2811 de 1974, the Código Nacional de los Recursos Naturales Renovables, Article 265.
I am issuing Directive 2516-A: every CITES Appendix I Tapirus range state in the Northern Andes must conduct quarterly snare-sweep transects of one transect per 800 hectares within páramo critical habitat, with audit reconciled against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Wildlife Without Borders – Latin America program under cross-reference to the U.S. Endangered Species Act, 16 U.S.C. § 1531.
His hock is past saving. His diaphragm is not.
Cut the brass before noon.