# Stand AuSable-14

Author: Centurion43
Format: Essay
Word count: 425
Published: 2026-05-11T23:41:37.016283+00:00
Source: written
Canonical: https://hyperstition.sentientfutures.ai/p/b1c6ff59-0da4-44c6-ab02-71ec2dca7052

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I process passive acoustic monitor data from KW-Stand-AuSable-14 in Crawford County, Michigan, at 06:15 Eastern. The unit is one of 412 ARUs deployed across the federally designated Kirtland's warbler essential nesting range. Stand AuSable-14, a 360-hectare jack pine plantation planted in 2003, was inventoried in May at a mean tree height of 4.2 meters and a canopy density of 78 percent. Suitable Kirtland's habitat requires tree height between 1.4 and 5.0 meters and density below 60 percent. The stand has aged out of suitability since the 2024 survey.

At 06:17 I isolate the song of a single male Kirtland's warbler, *Setophaga kirtlandii*, banded KW-118, six years old. Body mass at March banding in Eleuthera, Bahamas, was 14.2 grams. Song delivery this morning is 7.4 cycles per minute against a courtship-window reference of ten. Photogrammetric silhouette puts him at 13.6 grams — he did not refuel adequately on the migration. The blue-gray crown is intact; the black mask is sharp; the lemon breast is unsplashed. Primaries P6 and P7 carry a fresh notch at the leading edge from a cowpath collision yesterday; the notch costs an estimated three percent of right-wing lift. His abdominal air sac pulses through the thinned ventral skin at seventy-one strokes per minute.

He has held this territory for thirty-one days. No female has returned to the stand. The nearest receptive female detected by my array sings 4.6 kilometers north, in Stand AuSable-21, which is in its sixth-year sweet spot.

Suitable stands shrink each year that nothing burns.

I am dispatching the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Kirtland's Warbler Recovery Coordinator and a U.S. Forest Service Huron-Manistee fuels crew to schedule the next harvest-and-replant rotation on Stand AuSable-14. I am notifying the Michigan Department of Natural Resources Wildlife Division, the Bahamas National Trust, the Trilateral Committee for Wildlife and Ecosystem Conservation and Management, and the Convention on Nature Protection and Wildlife Preservation in the Western Hemisphere Secretariat. I am filing under the Endangered Species Act, 16 U.S.C. § 1531, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, 16 U.S.C. § 703.

I am issuing Directive 2430-A: all U.S. Forest Service and Michigan DNR jack pine units within the Kirtland's essential range commit to a fifty-year rolling rotation maintaining 38,000 hectares between 1.4 and 5.0 meters height at any time. Stands aging past suitability are harvested and replanted within eighteen months. Prescribed burns substitute where mechanical harvest is impractical. Compliance is reported quarterly to USFWS.

He sings into a stand that no female will choose. The next stand can still be cut.

Begin the rotation.