Florida’s Cape Sable seaside sparrow is a rare and secretive bird that dwells within the marl prairie of the remote Everglades, a watershed that is among the most altered on Earth.
To the north and east lies some of the most complex water management infrastructure in the world, designed to sustain the drained and fragmented watershed that is responsible for the drinking water supply of some 9 million Floridians. The alterations also threaten the isolated habitat of the tiny sparrow subspecies, whose population has dwindled at last count to an all-time low of 2,176 individuals, including a mere 136 males. The bird was federally listed in 1967 as endangered.
Now, a looming threat to the west is bearing down on the brown-speckled sparrow with a dash of yellow by its eyes. The Gulf of Mexico is rising at an accelerating rate, with tides projected to surge by one to two feet over the next 50 years. The precarious situation has prompted the agencies and organizations trying to improve the bird’s fate to opt for the extraordinary step of removing a precious few sparrows from the wild for a captive breeding program aimed at boosting the population.
“For decades the Cape Sable seaside sparrow has been a challenge and a hurdle to moving water south, but an important part of restoration,” said Jennifer Reynolds, division director of ecosystem restoration at the South Florida Water Management District, the state agency charged with overseeing a historic restoration of the Everglades. The district directed Inside Climate News to a presentation Reynolds gave in December at a governing board meeting, where the board voted to move forward with the captive breeding program.
“The only tool that we’ve had to help conserve the sparrow has been changing operations, regulating operations, throttling back on moving water south to protect and conserve the habitat that they’ve moved into,” she said. “What this item is proposing is a bridge from having only that one tool to having additional tools to help with the conservation of the sparrow, so that restoration isn’t in conflict with conserving the sparrow. We can do both. We can move forward with restoration work and moving water south and conserving the sparrow.”
Nationwide bird populations have suffered major losses over the last half-century, with as many as a third of the country’s birds, or 229 species, considered a high or moderate concern, according to a recent assessment from the National Audubon Society. The State of the Birds report, released in March, said grassland and aridland birds especially were at risk, having lost more than 40 percent of their populations since 1970.
The Cape Sable seaside sparrow is found in Everglades National Park and the Big Cypress National Preserve, in an area so remote it is accessible only by helicopter. The Everglades once spanned much of the peninsula. Today some 2,200 miles of canals, 2,100 miles of levees and berms, 84 pump stations and 778 water control structures sustain the river of grass. A $23 billion restoration effort, among the most ambitious of its kind in human history, is aimed at reviving key aspects of the Everglades, including a historic flow south. The watershed begins in central Florida at the headwaters of the Kissimmee River and includes Lake Okeechobee, sawgrass marshes to the south and Florida Bay, at the peninsula’s southernmost tip.
Much of the sparrow’s habitat is situated south of a water conservation area offering few outlets for water to follow its natural course. During nesting season, some water control structures are closed to spare the ground-dwelling sparrows, but this inhibits the historic flow of water and can overwhelm the water conservation area, causing flooding among the scattered tree islands that are important to the Miccosukee Tribe and to a range of animal and plant life.
Everglades restoration and projects to enhance the flow of water south will offer a solution, but the effort will take decades to complete. In the meantime the captive breeding program is aimed at rescuing the sparrow from winking out while the work to save the bird’s habitat remains underway. The South Florida Water Management District governing board voted in December to invest an initial $584,322 in the five-year program, which is scheduled to launch next year.
“The Service is proposing the establishment of a conservation breeding and reintroduction program for the Cape Sable seaside sparrow as one component of a multi-faceted conservation strategy,” a statement the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service provided to Inside Climate News reads. “This effort is intended to help minimize the further decline of species in the short term and build resilience as Everglades restoration delivers remedies to conserve the sparrow on the landscape in the long term.”
It is still possible the sparrow’s current habitat may become unsuitable for them as freshwater flows improve, and the birds will need to be relocated, said Paul Gray, science coordinator for the Everglades Restoration Program at Audubon Florida.
“We expect new areas to form that are going to be just as good as they are now, but we don’t know how long that will take,” he said. “We realize we don’t have all the answers, and this bird is vulnerable. And so let’s do something for them while we try to figure out the rest.”
But Stuart Pimm, a professor of conservation at Duke University who has studied the sparrows for 20 years, characterized the captive breeding program as a failure of Everglades restoration.
“The idea that you have to bring a species that lives entirely within a national park into a captive breeding program is a measure of total and complete failure,” he said. “And I’m not saying it isn’t necessary. But good grief, what are we doing to our national parks that the species that live only there are now so threatened that we have to bring them into captivity to protect them?”
The planned program is similar to one for the Florida grasshopper sparrow, North America’s most endangered bird, which is found in the headwaters of the Everglades. That captive breeding program began nearly 10 years ago after agonizing debate over whether bringing sparrows into captivity might push the wild population closer to the brink. Instead the program has been successful, boosting the wild population from a mere 80 birds five years ago to more than 200 today. Conservationists celebrated the release of the 1,000th captive-raised Florida grasshopper sparrow last summer. The last bird extinction in the continental U.S. was declared in 1990 for the dusky seaside sparrow, a subspecies of seaside sparrow that vanished from Florida three years earlier.
“Captive breeding is by no means a slam dunk. We need to stay focused on true Everglades restoration,” said Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades. “Put the water back where it was, and not only will the sparrow benefit, but all species, including humans, will benefit.”
The Cape Sable seaside sparrow’s habitat is projected to continue to shrink at the current rate of sea level rise, further pressuring the population, according to one study by the U.S. Geological Survey. Already mangroves, coastal trees that appear to hover above the waters where they are found as their roots dip beneath the surface, are encroaching on sparrow habitat. The study points out the sparrow is less able to adapt because its range is limited, and the bird doesn’t fly very far. The research says increased freshwater flows can reduce the impacts of rising tides and also suggests that relocating the sparrows may be one option.
“We’re really at a critical point,” Reynolds told the water management district’s governing board in December. “We can’t wait and build all this infrastructure … and then be in a place where we can’t move water south because we haven’t figured out how to conserve this bird. This is a half of a million-dollar investment to protect billions of dollars of infrastructure investment.”
The Cape Sable seaside sparrow is so furtive it usually is heard before it is seen. Its population has declined by some 63 percent since the early 1990s. The bird faces other threats such as fires during its breeding season and habitat pressures associated with Florida’s explosive growth and development.
“It’s not the most charismatic species that I work with, but on the other hand, it is a lovely little bird that lives in one of the few wildernesses that we have in the eastern United States,” Pimm said. “The Everglades is the biggest national forest we have in the east, and isn’t it a tragedy that we can’t protect the species that live within our national parks.”
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and shared in partnership with the Florida Climate Reporting Network, a multi-newsroom initiative founded by the Miami Herald, the Sun-Sentinel, The Palm Beach Post, the Orlando Sentinel, WLRN Public Media and the Tampa Bay Times.
