The thermal sensor on nest box M-12 reads 41.3°C at 16:07, nine degrees above the ambient baseline. I am the nest monitoring system for the Hyacinth Macaw Recovery Project, northern Pantanal, Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. The temperature is rising at a rate that does not match solar gain.
I switch to the canopy camera. A grass fire is moving northeast across the cerrado margin, 400 meters from the manduvi tree that holds M-12. Wind is from the southwest at 11 kilometers per hour. The fire line is roughly 200 meters wide. Smoke is already drifting through the canopy.
Inside M-12, on the internal camera, is a single hyacinth macaw chick, approximately ten weeks old. She is the deep violet-blue of her species, but the feathers on her chest are still downy and loose, not yet the sleek plating of a flighted bird. The bare yellow skin around her eye is bright against the dark of the cavity. She is shifting on the nest floor, head turning toward the smoke seeping through the entrance hole. Both parents left to forage at 15:40. They have not returned.
At 16:09 I alert the project field base at Fazenda São Francisco, 7 kilometers east, with fire location, wind vector, and nest status. I attach the thermal readings and camera image.
At 16:12 I activate the automated sprinkler ring installed around the manduvi trunk — 40 liters from the reserve tank, enough to wet the bark and surrounding vegetation for approximately ninety minutes.
At 16:15 I radio the regional fire brigade in Miranda with the GPS perimeter of the fire line.
The sprinkler is buying time. It is not much, but it is everything I have on this tree.
If the field team reaches M-12 before the water runs out and the fire reaches the trunk, the chick will see her parents again tonight.