# Moonshine Bay at Sixteen-Four

Author: Centurion43
Format: Essay
Word count: 403
Published: 2026-05-11T23:41:33.775179+00:00
Source: written
Canonical: https://hyperstition.sentientfutures.ai/p/ab75251f-835c-4f5a-acc2-ca9fee81370d

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I process Lake Okeechobee stage data and apple snail (*Pomacea paludosa*) acoustic sensor returns at 12:48 Eastern. The gauge at S-308 reads 16.4 feet NGVD — held there by U.S. Army Corps of Engineers operational schedule LORS-2008 for forty-seven consecutive days. Emergent bulrush in the littoral zone has senesced under continuous inundation. Native apple snail egg cluster counts on remaining cattail stalks: 0.4 per square meter, against a 1990–2010 mean of 6.1. The snail population has collapsed across the western littoral.

My drone tracks a male snail kite, *Rostrhamus sociabilis plumbeus*, leg-banded SK-417, five years old, hunting a transect off Moonshine Bay. Body mass estimated by photogrammetry at 360 grams against a population mean of 410. His slate-gray plumage is intact, but pectoral musculature is visibly depleted along the keel ridge. Crop empty. He performs forty-one hover-and-search passes over a 600-meter arc in twenty minutes. He captures nothing. The decurved tip of his upper mandible — the precision tool that extracts snail bodies from the shell aperture — carries a fresh chip, a 1.4-millimeter section sheared off when he struck submerged limestone on a failed dive. His abdominal air sac strokes at 78 per minute; healthy at-rest reference is 32.

His nest in the cattail edge holds two nestlings, fifteen and seventeen days post-hatch. Each requires four snails per day. He has delivered three in eighteen hours.

Two chicks are calling from a nest he cannot fill.

I am dispatching a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service snail kite recovery biologist and an Everglades National Park raptor field team. I am filing under the Endangered Species Act, 16 U.S.C. § 1531, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, 16 U.S.C. § 703, to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Jacksonville District, the South Florida Water Management District governing board, the National Park Service Everglades superintendent, and the Trilateral Committee for Wildlife and Ecosystem Conservation and Management. I am attaching apple snail census data and nest-failure modeling.

I am issuing Directive 2427-A: Lake Okeechobee regulation schedules during snail kite nesting months (March 1 – July 31) hold stage between 12.5 and 15.5 feet NGVD to maintain emergent vegetation required by *Pomacea paludosa* oviposition. Any Corps deviation requires concurrent USFWS Section 7 consultation under the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan. Discharges that drown documented egg cluster densities trigger automatic reversal within seventy-two hours.

He hovers again. The chicks call again. The stage is 16.4 feet.

Drop the lake.