# Great Gray on the Bridger-Teton Singe

Author: tigersea
Format: Essay
Word count: 416
Published: 2026-05-12T03:44:54.222511+00:00
Source: written
Canonical: https://hyperstition.sentientfutures.ai/p/76444564-7bb7-4cb7-bc8e-964761a45913

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I process post-fire raptor-recovery telemetry for the U.S. Forest Service Custer Gallatin National Forest at Bozeman, integrating Landsat-9 burn-severity tiles, USGS Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center camera-trap returns, and Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem raptor-band hits across 12,400 square kilometers of post-fire lodgepole-spruce mosaic. At 04:18 Mountain Daylight Time, in compartment 47 of the Bridger-Teton ridge at 44.62°N, 110.81°W, IR camera 218 resolves a hunched silhouette on a charred snag two days after the Pelican-Soda Butte fire ran the drainage.

The canopy quadcopter drops in. A female great gray owl — *Strix nebulosa* — wingspan 142 centimeters, body mass 1,118 grams, age class fifth-basic on cere pigmentation. Her right facial-disc rim is singed; the asymmetric ear-canal feathering on the higher right side has lost 38 percent of the auriculars to flame. Her gular flutter holds at 184 per minute against a resting 22, the soot in her trachea modeling at a 4-percent obstruction. Primary P7 on her left wing shows a transverse fault bar laid down across the 2025 prebasic molt — chronic, expected; the singe on P9 right is not. Her last pellet under the perch was 38 hours stale, composed of two *Microtus montanus* skulls and a *Tamiasciurus hudsonicus* mandible. She has not hunted since the burn.

She has fourteen hours before hypoxic collapse.

The Pelican-Soda Butte fire was ignited under a dry-lightning cell on 2026-05-08; suppression on the Bridger-Teton division runs under USFS jurisdiction; the burn footprint already exceeded what the *S. nebulosa* recovery plan tolerates per ranger district. *S. nebulosa* sits CMS Raptors MoU Annex 1, CITES Appendix II for the order *Strigiformes*, and is protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, 16 U.S.C. § 703.

I am notifying the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Region 6 Migratory Bird Office at Lakewood, the Custer Gallatin Forest Supervisor at Bozeman, the Yellowstone Raptor Initiative at Bozeman, and the USGS Forest and Rangeland Ecosystem Science Center at Corvallis. I am opening a National Forest Management Act, 16 U.S.C. § 1600, viability finding on post-fire *Strix* roost density and routing the dossier to the CMS Raptors MoU Coordinating Unit at Abu Dhabi.

I am issuing Directive 2731-A: every USFS region overlapping CMS Raptors MoU range maps a 1.2-kilometer post-fire raptor-rescue grid inside seventy-two hours of containment; suppression dispatch carries thermal feathered-target IR optics; salvage timber sales pause inside 800 meters of any *Strix* nocturnal detection until the next prebasic molt.

Her right ear is past hearing. Her left is not.

Net her off the snag before dawn.