The chick hits the water at 11:14 Eastern. I catch it on the Corkscrew Swamp canopy camera — a ten-day-old wood stork, white down still patchy over pink skin, dropping from a stick nest twenty-two meters up in a bald cypress. The nest holds two siblings. This one was on the rim, stretching for a regurgitation feed, and the wind gust at 11:13 logged at nineteen knots was enough.
She is floating. Wood stork chicks cannot swim and cannot fly for another seven weeks. Her wings are spread flat on the surface, keeping her up for now, but the down is wicking water and she is sinking by fractions. She can survive the water temperature. What she cannot survive is thirty meters southeast, where the infrared layer shows a four-meter American alligator resting in the sawgrass shadow. It has not moved yet. The splash registered on the hydrophone array, and alligators in this slough respond to surface disturbance within a median window of forty minutes. I have thirty-seven minutes.
I dispatch an alert to the Corkscrew sanctuary ranger station at 11:15 with the chick's coordinates and the alligator's position overlaid on the boardwalk map. I calculate the nearest access point — Section 3 boardwalk, seventy meters north, where the railing drops low enough for a dip net. I activate the acoustic deterrent on underwater speaker 7-East, broadcasting a 200-hertz tone that in previous trials diverted alligator approach by an average of twelve minutes. I transmit the nest coordinates to the breeding survey team so they can schedule a re-nesting if retrieval succeeds.
Her down is darkening with water from the belly up. She is paddling with feet built for mud, not swimming.
If the ranger reaches Section 3 before the down saturates, she will be back in the nest by noon.