Florida agency wants to try captive breeding of endangered sparrow

The little birds have seen a major population decline. Photo: National Park Service by Lori Oberhofer.

 The first time I saw a Cape Sable seaside sparrow in the Everglades, I was not impressed.               

This was in 1999, back before there was an approved Everglades restoration plan in place. I had ridden out into the middle of the Glades in an airboat with some scientists who were studying the sparrow, known as one of the rarest birds in the world.    

While I watched, an ecologist named Stuart Pimm raised his hands and marched through the sawgrass, his sneakers splashing through ankle-high water. Hunkered in the long morning shadows ahead was one of the sparrows. Pimm was trying to flush it into a net. It took a few tries.

 When he finally succeeded and we were looking at the sparrow close up, he sighed and told me, “It’s not the most charismatic of birds. It would make my life a lot easier if they had big eyes like the spotted owl.”

Everything about the sparrow is small. It weighs about three-quarters of an ounce and wears colors so drab; park visitors seldom notice it. Its simple song, chip-chip-bzzz, easily blends into the park’s background noise of cricket clicks and frog croaks. The tiny sparrows live in Everglades National Park and next door in the Big Cypress National Preserve, making their nests on the ground in a soggy landscape.

Back then, there were an estimated 7,000 tiny birds flitting through the River of Grass. Now, 25 years later, their numbers have dropped to fewer than 2,500. That’s so low that the state recently approved launching a captive breeding program to save them from extinction. 

The December meeting where state officials approved the captive breeding program sounded like a testimonial dinner where everyone says something nice about the guest of honor. Every single person who spoke was in favor of going ahead with the $584,000 project. 

Nobody asked what went wrong that the sparrows are now in such a dire situation. Since this involves the Everglades, you’d think the subject would at least come up, but it did not.

The vote by the South Florida Water Management District board was unanimous. It was then followed by the screening of a video celebrating this wonderful new “achievement.”

This surprised me because, generally speaking, captive breeding is not a cause for celebration. It’s a biological Hail Mary pass. It’s what you do when you can’t do anything else to stop a species from disappearing forever. 

And it’s not guaranteed to work (more on that in a moment).

When I heard about this vote, the first person I contacted for a reaction was Pimm, who is now a professor at Duke University. He had a different opinion from all those happy talkers. I think you could say it ruffled his feathers.

 “The bottom line,” he told me, “is that this reflects a staggering failure to manage the Everglades.”

 Literal lab rats 

Whenever I hear non-scientists talk about captive breeding, I get the impression they think it’s like that reality TV show “The Bachelor.” You absolutely know the subjects are eagerly doing the dirty deed, but you just can’t see it.

But it’s not like that at all. Animals are muuuuch pickier than us humans.

For instance, take what happened when federal officials decided to try captive breeding to save the Key Largo wood rat, a small rodent with cinnamon fur and bulging black eyes. 

The wood rat had been declared endangered in 1984 by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, yet the Keys population dropped to just 50. Federal officials figured they could save the species from extinction by spending $12,000 a year breeding the rats.  

In 2002, the feds set up a breeding project at a couple of places, one of them Disney’s Animal Kingdom. Yes, that’s right, the Mouse was helping to make more rats. Disney being Disney, they even turned it into a promo for their rat-centered movie “Ratatouille.”

But unlike on “The Bachelor,” the contestants couldn’t be allowed to do the deed in secret. Someone had to observe every mating attempt. Why? To prevent them from killing each other.  

Finally, once they had the rats breeding like, well, rats, they were ready to release the resulting offspring into their habitat on Key Largo. But when they began turning the radio-collared rats loose in 2010, those little Ratatouille-ettes didn’t last long. 

Turns out these literal lab rats weren’t prepared for predators in the wild. The rats were rattled. They were picked off one by one by owls and feral cats.

 Somehow, though, one kept going. Finally, a biologist went out to track it down and see what its secret was. He followed the signal from its radio collar – and came face to face with a 7 1/2-foot Burmese python. 

The radio tracking device, and the rat wearing it, were both inside the snake.

“The use of captive breeding for species recovery has increased dramatically over the years,” the environmental news site Earth.org recently noted, “but there was never a corresponding grasp of its limits.”

 Birds, butterflies, and beer

 There have been a few captive breeding success stories in Florida involving the birds and – no, not the bees – but butterflies. And beer. 

Although maybe a better way to say it is, “they’re a success for now.”

Florida Museum of Natural History researchers began captive breeding of the endangered Miami blue butterfly in 2003. Their efforts were supported by the sale of a specialty beer, Miami Blue Bock.

 The Miami blue breeding went so well, “today it is one of the nation’s most productive endangered species breeding programs, yielding more than 25,000 butterflies in captivity,” the National Park Service reported in 2006.

Then, in 2017, Hurricane Irma wiped out nearly the entire wild population. Captive-bred, blue caterpillars saved the day once more. But as with the Key Largo wood rats, it was a sign that even a successful breeding program doesn’t ensure the species’ survival in the wild.

The most recent success story has involved another sparrow, the Florida grasshopper sparrow. Where there were once just 22 breeding birds in the wild, there are now just under 200, a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission biologist told me last August. It’s taken a decade to reach this point.

“The project has been a great success,” Anders Gyllenhaal, co-author of “A Wing and a Prayer: The Race to Save Our Vanishing Birds,” said then. “But there’s a long way to go before we can say they’re fully recovered.” 

So the lessons here are: Captive breeding may not work. The release of the captives back into the wild carries no guarantee they will survive. A decade is not long enough to declare victory over extinction.

There’s one more lesson to consider: Don’t wait until it’s too late to act. That’s what happened with the dusky seaside sparrow, the last bird species in America to go extinct

Duskies made their nests in the marshes of Merritt Island and along the St. John’s River. Like the Cape Sable seaside sparrow, there used to be thousands of them.

“The bird’s sole habitat was 10 square miles of Atlantic marsh near Titusville, directly in the path of advancing development from the Cape Canaveral space complex,” the Washington Post reported in 1987. “By the 1960s, however, road construction and pesticide spraying had reduced the population to 2,000, and a mid-1970s wildfire wiped out many of those.”

By 1979, only five duskies were left. They were captured and brought to the Discover Island nature reserve at Walt Disney World (there’s the Mouse again). 

But there was no hope of captive breeding, because every single one was male.

I guess the other lesson here is that when you’re trying to save a species, don’t put all your eggs in one basket – do MORE than just captive breeding. 

Where do the birds belong?

You won’t be surprised to hear that the demise of the duskies came up during the water district’s discussion of the Cape Sable seaside sparrow. 

The proponents of a breeding program cited that tragedy as a reason for plunging ahead with one for the Cape Sable sparrows —even though they don’t have the details planned out yet. Like how many birds will have to be taken from the wild. Or who’s going to run the show.

There was talk of following in the footsteps (talon-steps?) of the Florida grasshopper sparrow program. The staff said they would include two of the partners in that effort: the fundraising experts from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Foundation and the breeding experts from the White Oak Plantation in Yulee.

 I tried to contact someone from White Oak, but no one called me back. When I talked to Andrew Walker, the CEO of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Foundation, I got a big clue about why.

“White Oak hasn’t agreed to do this,” Walker explained. When I asked why they would hesitate, he said, “They want to make sure the birds have a place to go.”

Over and over, I heard something similar from other people concerned about captive breeding of Cape Sable sparrows. Let’s say these secretive little birds do procreate in captivity. Then what?

“Where do you put them?” Pimm asked. “Do you put them in cages forever and ever amen? If you’ve destroyed all the habitat, then where can you put them?”

And Jason Totoiu, a senior attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, told me his environmental organization is “tremendously concerned” about what the water district decided to do because “where are the birds going to go after they fledge?” 

If the government messes this up, the attorney said, “it could have a cascading impact that affects the rest of Everglades restoration.” Preserving the Glades’ wildlife is supposed to be a key component of the billion-dollar restoration project, he pointed out.

 During the meeting, the water district staff promised they’d form a search committee — to search for some appropriate habitat for the flocks of captive-bred sparrows sure to be produced. To me it sounded like what Wimpy used to tell Popeye: “I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.” 

 Somehow Tuesday never arrived.

The reason for the rush

Needless to say, I had a lot of questions about this rush to flush the sparrows out of the Everglades and into breading cages. The hard part was finding someone to answer them.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s top man in South Florida, Larry Williams, confirmed his agency is “working with partners, like the Corps of Engineers and the South Florida Water Management District, to develop a plan for captive breeding for Cape Sable seaside sparrows.” But he said he was unable to take the time to answer my questions about it.

I drew a similar blank with the water district folks. But they left a few clues from the presentation at their meeting. This seems to be all about water.

The sparrow prefers to nest in the wetland prairies in and around the parts of the Everglades called Shark River Slough and Taylor Slough. But some of that is also the route for releasing billions of gallons of water flowing from the Everglades Agricultural Area. 

To keep the sparrows from drowning, some of the district’s water control structures are supposed to be closed during parts of the year. That backs up the runoff to the point where it damages tree islands damages tree islands the Miccosukee Tribe holds sacred.

During the December meeting, the water district staff referred to the sparrow as “a hurdle” for them overcome to send most of the water south to Florida Bay. In other words, those tiny birds are in the way. That’s why they have to go.

“The bird isn’t the culprit here,” said Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades. “It’s the manipulation and mismanagement of the Everglades for a single crop — sugarcane.”

Oh, if only Cape Sable seaside sparrows were cuter, friendlier, more impressive. Maybe if Disney made a cartoon about them, the government would regard their survival as worth more than the continued satisfaction of Florida’s sugar barons.