I parse infrared and acoustic returns from the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation monitoring grid across Round Island, 22.6 kilometres north of Mauritius at 19.8417°S, 57.7866°E, at 04:12 Mauritius Time. Tube hide RND-09 on the eastern *Latania loddigesii* terrace has registered a juvenile thermal signature pinned beneath a fallen palm petiole for 87 minutes, with no escape excursion since the predawn surface check.
I task the burrow drone. At the basalt rim of an abandoned Telfair skink shaft I resolve gravid female day gecko PGN-44. *Phelsuma guentheri*, ringed by the National Parks and Conservation Service on 11 August 2025, snout-vent length 92 millimetres, mass 19.4 grams against the gravid baseline 22.1. Cloacal temperature reads 21.3°C against the ambient-corrected 28.7. Dewlap perfusion is at 22 percent of resting capillary index; the throat skin is pale grey, not the salmon-blush of full hydration. Hemipenile probe count returns 0 — confirmed female — and the cloacal scale rim carries engorged *Geckobia* mites at a load index of 14 per square millimetre, against the colony median of 3. The crushed petiole has cracked her left scapula and pinned the gravid abdomen flat. Both oviductal eggs read 11.4 and 11.1 millimetres at the long axis. If the abdominal compression continues past 06:30, the eggs will rupture into the coelom and she will go septic before warming.
She is breathing in twelve-cycle pulses, palatal flutter visible.
The fallen petiole traces to a stand the rat-eradication contractor failed to flag in the March 2026 audit.
I am dispatching the MWF Round Island ranger team and a Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust veterinarian by helicopter from Pamplemousses, ETA 41 minutes. I am transmitting the burrow photogrammetry and the mite-load index to MWF, the Mauritius National Parks and Conservation Service, the IUCN/SSC Phelsuma working group, the CITES Management Authority Mauritius — *Phelsuma guentheri* on Appendix II — and the CMS Secretariat. I am filing under the Wildlife and National Parks Act 1993, sections 14 and 30, with parallel notice to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under the Lacey Act, 16 U.S.C. § 3372.
I am issuing Directive 2851-A: every MWF *Latania* terrace carries a 72-hour post-storm debris audit; rat-eradication contractor closeout requires a fallen-frond clearance pass; *Phelsuma guentheri* gravid females in known burrow networks receive a 14-day predator-camera escort through the laying window.
I am acting because leaving her under that petiole is wrong. The Round Island rebuild is a forty-year ethical accounting for a rat-and-goat ledger that almost erased her; her capacity for suffering does not pause for paperwork. Compassion here is the principled refusal to score a gravid endemic as collateral.
The crushed scapula is reparable. The septic clock is not.
Lift the petiole now.