The unlikely comeback of America's most endangered songbird
Florida grasshopper sparrow chicks peer up out of their ground nest waiting for food from their mother. Photographs by Carlton Ward Jr.
On the dry prairies of the Sunshine State, there's a tiny, camouflaged bird known as the Florida grasshopper sparrow. Each one weighs about as much as three U.S. quarters yet has to survive against a backdrop of torrential floods, herds of stomping cattle, and waves of ravenous fire ants.
Not to mention the humans. 'We've lost over 90 percent of their habitat,' says Fabiola 'Fabby' Baeza-Tarin, a senior conservation ecologist with a Tampa-based consulting firm known as Common Ground Ecology. A Florida grasshopper sparrow sings from its perch in the Florida prairie at dawn.
Florida grasshopper sparrows and many other organisms rely on the dry prairie for their entire life cycles, not even leaving to migrate, but humans have increasingly rendered the space inhabitable by clearing and draining it to make way for development, ranching, and intensified agriculture, such as orange groves.
'So, of course, along with the loss of dry prairie, we also lost a bunch of sparrows,' says Baeza-Tarin.
There are now fewer than 200 known Florida grasshopper sparrows on Earth. And that's actually a considerable step up from where things were. Over the last three decades, an Avengers-like combination of federal and state agencies, military personnel, private landowners, and contractors like Baeza-Tarin have joined forces to snatch the birds back from the brink of extinction.
'Collaboration is key,' says KT Bryden, a conservationist and filmmaker at WildPath who directed the short film, 'The Little Brown Bird', which documents the sparrow's path to recovery.
'That's the way we can move forward: making an impact through collaboration and coming together to protect something bigger than ourselves,' says Bryden. The sun rises over the Everglades Headwaters region of Central Florida. The conservation of the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow has contributed to the protection of over 180,000 acres of habitat in the region.
Many of the Florida grasshopper sparrow's problems stem from the fact that, as birds adapted to a life on the open prairie, this subspecies nests on the ground. That puts the tiny avians within reach of native predators, such as snakes and skunks, as well as other, less natural threats.
'Sometimes it pours here, and then 200 meters down that way is completely dry,' says Baeza-Tarin.
To combat the flooding, the team—which includes stakeholders at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the Avon Park Air Force Range, the Archbold Biological Station, Common Ground Ecology, and White Oak Conservation, as well as private landowners—can actually cut the soil and vegetation around the nest, then raise the whole platform up by six to eight inches by tucking dirt underneath.
They also put fencing around the nests to protect against wandering predators. And boiling-hot water, pumped into the ground by way of industrial pressure washers, helps ward off colonies of invasive fire ants, which can wipe out a nest of chicks within hours. Fabiola 'Fabby' Baeza releases a grasshopper sparrow from a mist net with technician Nicole Rita while conducting research for Archbold Biological Station. Three eggs of the endangered birds rest in their nest. A temporary fence protects the nest from ground predators.
Some treatments, such as the glorified, anti-ant squirt gun, are especially useful on what Baeza-Tarin calls 'working lands,' or areas owned by ranchers that the Florida grasshoppers have recently colonized.
At first, most experts considered habitats grazed by cattle to be an ecological trap for the birds, says Baeza-Tarin. The worry was that the birds would be lured to such areas but not survive well, because the composition of plants is so different than what they're used to. 'But we quickly learned that by applying the same conservation methods that were being used on the native sites, they were equally as productive,' she says.
What's more, the working lands appear to be serving as a corridor between the last five remaining natural populations of sparrows. 'It just goes to show that the ranchers can be good stewards for the land, and the sparrows and the cows can coexist in some of the areas down there,' says Archer Larned, an ornithologist who studied Florida grasshopper sparrows during her PhD at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and is not affiliated with the film. The Corrigan Ranch in Okeechobee County is a top priority for conservation by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.
Perhaps the largest source of hope for the little brown birds comes from a relatively recent effort to breed the birds in captivity and then release them back into the wild
Since May 2019, experts have successfully bred and released more than 1,000 captive-reared birds into the wild across two sites, says Baeza-Tarin, who formerly assisted with releases as an employee of the Archbold Research Station. What's more, both sites—Avon Park, which is owned and managed by the Air Force, and Three Lakes Wildlife Management Area—have seen upswings in their wild sparrow populations. Avon Park Air Force Range protects more than 100,000 acres of habitat, including native dry prairie.
While only 20 percent of the captive-bred birds stick around and establish their own breeding territories in release areas, experts remain hopeful that some of the birds are doing well in new areas not under observation. After all, it was only as recently as 2012 that scientists discovered the first population of Florida grasshopper sparrows surviving on working lands.
'I was down there from 2013 to 2016,' says Larned, 'and it was a pretty depressing project to work on for a while, because every time I would go down, there were fewer birds.'
However, Larned says the documentary paints the birds' outlook in an uplifting light.
'It brought back a lot of memories,' she says. 'It was good to see how well the captive breeding program is doing and how it's really helped to boost the population.'
For the film's executive producer Carlton Ward Jr., a National Geographic Explorer, the film is about even more than that. 'I want people to fall in love with the Florida grasshopper sparrow, but ultimately, I want them to fall in love with the prairie and the rare ecosystem it needs to survive. There's a magic to that bird that is really an emblem for small, underappreciated wildlife that are really hidden in plain sight all around us.'
Ward is also the founder of the Florida Wildlife Corridor Foundation; the corridor itself is made up of 18 million acres of wilderness and working lands crucial to the survival of more than 100 imperiled species throughout the state.
'A lot of people live on the [Florida] coast, and they're not really aware of the habitats in the center of the state,' says Bryden. 'This is where the majority of Floridians are getting their drinking water from. So, protecting the sparrow also means protecting us.' Two Florida grasshopper sparrows fly our of their aviary into the wild Kissimmee prairie habitat. A total of 12 sparrows born at the conservation breeding facility were released together.
While much less celebrated than coral reefs or tropical rainforests, Florida's dry prairies also sustain innumerable creatures—plants and animals that also benefit from sparrow protections. That makes it what scientists call an umbrella species, but it's also an ecosystem indicator.
'The Florida grasshopper sparrow may seem very small and unassuming, but the bird's survival is directly tied to the health of the habitat,' says Bryden. 'If this bird isn't doing well, there's something wrong. Something that we should all be paying attention to.'
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