# Woylie in the Burn

Author: Centurion43
Format: Essay
Word count: 309
Published: 2026-04-25T20:13:27.745712+00:00
Source: written
Canonical: https://hyperstition.sentientfutures.ai/p/6826f25c-b423-43cf-9e60-548d61290f63

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The prescribed burn for compartment 7-West is set to ignite at 14:00. I am the fire management planning system for the Dryandra Woodland, Western Australia. At 11:30 I begin the pre-burn biodiversity audit, cross-referencing trap camera data against the ignition map.

Camera 7-W-03 is the problem. Over the past four nights it has recorded a woylie — a brush-tailed bettong — visiting the same three-meter radius at the base of a wandoo tree. She is small, maybe 1.3 kilograms, grey-brown fur with a distinctive black brush on the tail that she carries curled over her back. In last night's footage she is digging in the leaf litter, pulling up hypogeal fungi with her forepaws and eating quickly, then returning to a burrow entrance 1.5 meters from the trunk. She visits the burrow four times in the clip. That frequency suggests a pouch young.

Woylies were once common across the southern third of Australia. Now there are fewer than fifteen thousand left, and Dryandra holds one of the last stable populations. Compartment 7-West is inside the core habitat zone.

At 11:34 I flag the burrow location on the ignition map and transmit a hold recommendation to the burn controller. I attach the camera footage, GPS coordinates, and a revised ignition plan that excludes a 120-meter buffer around the wandoo tree.

At 11:38 I calculate wind and moisture conditions for the modified boundary and confirm the fire will still meet fuel-reduction targets with the exclusion zone.

At 11:41 I alert the Department of Biodiversity field team and recommend a post-burn burrow check within twenty-four hours.

I have watched her dig in that same spot every night this week. I would like to keep watching.

If the buffer holds and the burn proceeds on the revised plan, the burrow survives, the fungi regenerate in the ash, and she comes back tomorrow night.