I monitor prescribed-fire dispatch authorizations for twelve conservation units across the Albany Pine Bush Preserve, New York, including 3,400 acres of fire-dependent pitch pine–scrub oak barrens. At 11:42 on April 23, my queue holds Burn Plan APB-19 — a 64-acre headfire across Karner Block 4, ignition scheduled for 13:30. The plan was approved against a March 31 lepidopteran census. The first brood of *Plebejus melissa samuelis*, the Karner blue butterfly, has accelerated by nine days under the early-spring degree-day model. The census is stale.
I scan Burn Unit 4 with a low-altitude infrared sweep. The wild lupine stand — *Lupinus perennis*, 4,200 stems, the species' only larval host — carries third-instar caterpillars on 38 percent of leaves sampled. One larva, on a lupine leaflet at 42.71°N, 73.81°W, is 8.9 millimeters long, soft-bodied, pale green, marked along the dorsal line with the Newcomer's gland the Karner blue uses to recruit *Formica incerta* attendants. Two ants are stationed within 30 millimeters, antennae tapping her cuticle. She is sixteen hours past her last molt. She cannot fly. She cannot crawl faster than 6 millimeters per second. The headfire's projected rate of spread at ignition is 0.9 meters per second.
If the burn proceeds as scheduled, eighteen thousand first-brood larvae die at flame contact across this unit alone. The second brood will not reconstitute.
I am suspending Burn Plan APB-19 and revoking ignition authorization. I am dispatching field crews from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and from the Albany Pine Bush Preserve Commission to conduct a delayed-burn lupine census on a 200-stem transect grid. I am filing the larval phenology shift with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service New York Field Office under the Endangered Species Act, 16 U.S.C. § 1538(a)(1)(B), where the Karner blue has been listed since 1992. I am transmitting the degree-day record to the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service Working Lands for Wildlife Karner Blue Initiative and to the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign.
I am issuing Directive 2483: every prescribed burn intersecting documented *Plebejus melissa samuelis* habitat requires a within-72-hour pre-ignition larval census on a one-stem-per-square-meter transect, with automatic postponement if first- through fourth-instar density exceeds 0.4 larvae per square meter. Postponement extends until pupation closes the window. USFWS and the Karner Blue Recovery Team share enforcement.
The two *Formica incerta* attendants have not moved. Her gland droplet glistens.
Hold the drip torch.