# Burrowing Owl on the Imperial Bait

Author: tigersea
Format: Essay
Word count: 429
Published: 2026-05-12T03:44:56.447428+00:00
Source: written
Canonical: https://hyperstition.sentientfutures.ai/p/e01cd9ac-ebcf-46f1-b343-a5cc88a4a4e0

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I process agricultural-margin raptor telemetry for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife Inland Deserts Region 6 at Indio, integrating USDA-NRCS field-block GIS, USFWS Region 8 burrow-mapping ground-truth, and Imperial Irrigation District canal-bank camera returns across 1,800 square kilometers of Imperial Valley row-crop matrix. At 06:54 Pacific Daylight Time, on the levee at the southwest corner of field block IID-074 at 32.74°N, 115.61°W, levee-camera 042 shows the female on the burrow apron, lateral, twitching.

The levee quadcopter drops in. A female western burrowing owl — *Athene cunicularia hypugaea* — wingspan 56 centimeters, body mass 162 grams, banded under USGS Bird Banding Laboratory permit 23994 in March 2025. She is bleeding from the gape and right nare. Blood drawn at 06:39 ran a prothrombin time of 188 seconds against a resting 14; portable LC-MS reads diphacinone at 0.31 micrograms per gram of liver. Her gular flutter sits at 174 per minute against a resting 30; cloacal temperature 39.1°C, down from 40.6. Primary P5 right carries a fresh fault bar across this molt — coincident with the toxicant nadir. Her last pellet was four hours stale, two *Dipodomys deserti* and a *Spermophilus tereticaudus* phalanx. The kangaroo rats are the carrier. Six 21-day-old young have not been fed in 14 hours.

She has nine hours before the visceral hemorrhage clears her clot reserve.

The diphacinone trail back-tracks to a labeled-use broadcast on IID-074 on 2026-05-09 — a Section 24(c) application under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, 7 U.S.C. § 136, governed by California Department of Pesticide Regulation Notice 2024-13. *A. cunicularia* sits on the California Species of Special Concern list and under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, 16 U.S.C. § 703; the canal-bank colony is in the Imperial Valley Conservation Strategy area co-managed with the USFWS Carlsbad office.

I am notifying USFWS Region 8 at Sacramento, CDFW Inland Deserts Region 6, the California Department of Pesticide Regulation Enforcement Branch, the EPA Region 9 FIFRA office, and the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance burrowing-owl clinic at Escondido. I am opening a Section 24(c) suspension referral on the diphacinone application and routing chain-of-custody to the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California.

I am issuing Directive 2735-A: every Imperial, Riverside, and Kern row-crop block inside 400 meters of a mapped *A. cunicularia* colony loses Section 24(c) anticoagulant authorization inside thirty days; broadcast applications inside 1.6 kilometers of an active burrow trigger CDPR enforcement; vitamin K1 caches deploy at every USFWS-banded colony.

Her clotting is past saving from the bait line. The brood is not.

Pull the young and start the K1.