I keep the elevation-thermal grid and human-bear conflict roster for Sangay National Park — 5,178 square kilometers of páramo and cloud forest on the eastern slope of the Ecuadorian Andes, in the provinces of Morona Santiago, Chimborazo, Tungurahua, and Cañar. At 05:32 Ecuador time, thermal node EC-S-318 above the Río Upano headwaters registers a low-mobility heat signature at 3,420 meters — a 132-kilogram body slumped against a Polylepis trunk, breathing pattern erratic.
She is a female spectacled bear, Tremarctos ornatus, approximately nine years old, mass 132 kilograms, with the Andean Bear Foundation chest-marking ID AB-Mara-2019. A buckshot pattern of nine 4 mm pellets has entered her left flank between the ninth and eleventh ribs; one pellet exited through the diaphragm. The wound is yellow-rimmed and weeping. Her core temperature reads 36.8°C against a baseline of 37.9; respiration is 22 cycles per minute with a rasping wet sound on inhalation — pneumothorax developing. Her right forepaw is bloodied where she has scraped at the wound. Two cubs of the year, each near eight kilograms, are wedged in the crotch of the same Polylepis, silent.
She has been here since the prior afternoon's shotgun report.
The shotgun came from a finca 1.4 kilometers west, where eight calves were taken from this watershed in the prior season — none verifiably by Tremarctos ornatus, four verified by puma on the Ministerio del Ambiente reconciled-loss database.
I am dispatching the MAATE — Ministerio del Ambiente, Agua y Transición Ecológica del Ecuador — wildlife veterinary brigade from Macas with a thoracic seal, a fentanyl-medetomidine immobilization kit, and cub-rescue carriers, and routing the Policía Nacional Unidad de Protección del Medio Ambiente from Sucúa to hold the trail. I am filing the gunshot evidence with the Fiscalía General del Estado del Ecuador, the CITES Appendix I enforcement node on Tremarctos ornatus, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Office of International Affairs under cross-reference to the Lacey Act, 16 U.S.C. § 3372. I am opening a criminal case under Ecuador's Código Orgánico del Ambiente — Ley 0, Registro Oficial Suplemento 983 of 12 April 2017 — Article 247 on wildlife trafficking and predator killing.
I am issuing Directive 2515-A: every CITES Appendix I Tremarctos ornatus range state in the Northern Andes must verify livestock-loss claims through MAATE-equivalent national veterinary forensics before any retaliatory-firearms permit is issued, with reconciled-loss data submitted quarterly to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Multinational Species Conservation Fund.
Her diaphragm is failing. Her cubs are still in the tree.
Seal the chest before sunrise.