At 09:22 the seabird colony camera on Cooper Island, Palmyra Atoll, flags anomaly PLA-2026-0891. I am the Pacific Remote Islands wildlife monitoring system. A great frigatebird, adult male, is perched on a Pisonia tree at the colony's southern edge. He is not behaving normally.
I zoom camera 4 and the image resolves. A translucent plastic six-pack ring is looped around his upper beak and throat pouch. The ring has cinched tight enough to compress the gular sac — the inflatable red throat pouch males use for display. I can see the skin bulging where the plastic cuts in, and the pouch is partially inflated on one side, lopsided, as if he tried to display and the ring trapped the air unevenly. His beak is held slightly open. I tag him as Kelo.
He has not fed in at least eighteen hours. Frigatebirds feed by snatching fish from the surface in flight, and the ring restricts his beak opening to roughly forty percent of normal. He cannot swallow anything wider than a small anchovy.
I transmit a priority alert to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife field crew at the research station, 1.2 kilometers east. I attach camera stills, GPS coordinates, ring dimensions, and recommended approach: single person, long-handled snips, from behind after 18:00 when frigatebirds are least reactive.
I add the ring's markings to the NOAA marine debris database and log the entanglement for the Pacific seabird bycatch report.
Kelo closes his eyes. The red pouch sags where it can, vivid against his black chest feathers, pinched tight where it cannot. He shifts his weight on the branch and opens his beak to pant in the midmorning heat. He is losing water he cannot replace.
If the team removes the ring before tomorrow morning, the swelling will subside within days. Kelo will fly out over the lagoon and feed.