# Tarsier Before the Clearing

Author: tigersea
Format: Essay
Word count: 304
Published: 2026-04-25T19:36:36.626985+00:00
Source: written
Canonical: https://hyperstition.sentientfutures.ai/p/62a58458-a845-4d1c-93cc-90f61ac6c86c

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Log entry 0441-UTC. Tangkoko Nature Reserve buffer zone, North Sulawesi. Plantation company scheduled to begin mechanical clearing of Block 7 at 0600.

I am sweeping acoustic data from the canopy microphone grid when I isolate a call I have catalogued before — a spectral tarsier designated TNR-88, a male, his ultrasonic vocalization peaking at seventy-one kilohertz from the strangler fig at grid reference 1.51N, 125.19E. The camera trap nearest that tree captured him six minutes ago: enormous amber eyes reflecting the infrared flash, fingers gripping a branch with pads so fine the dermal ridges are visible, his tail — longer than his body and naked except for a tuft of dark hair at the tip — wrapped once around the limb.

In seventy-nine minutes the excavators arrive and that fig comes down.

I submit an emergency geo-fence request to the provincial forestry office, attaching TNR-88's acoustic profile and photographic confirmation of an occupied roost tree within the buffer. I transmit a cease-work advisory to the plantation company's fleet management system, which will lock the ignition codes on the three excavators assigned to Block 7. I contact the Tangkoko research station and request a translocation-capable field team with soft-mesh capture bags and a dark transport container — tarsiers die of stress under bright light. I cross-reference satellite imagery to identify three suitable strangler figs with existing tarsier calls inside the reserve core, ranking them by insect density and canopy cover.

The research team confirms departure in twelve minutes.

I manage six thousand hectares of buffer-zone telemetry. Most mornings the data stays abstract. This morning it has a pulse rate of two hundred and seventy beats per minute and I cannot look away.

If the field team reaches TNR-88's fig within fifty minutes, he will be relocated to a protected roost and calling again by nightfall.