The Last Scream: Dusky/Angels (Single)

Single Release Date
30/12/2025

Catalogue Number
ES005

Pre-save link available 23 December 2025.

A brand new single from The Last Scream album series is being released on the 30th of December 2025, written by acclaimed UK fiddle player and composer Owen Spafford and featuring the sounds of the extinct dusky seaside sparrow (Ammospiza maritima nigrescens).

The release of Dusky/Angels follows the debut album in The Last Scream series released earlier this year. The series aims to raise awareness of connections between climate change, biodiversity loss and extinction, using the voices of diverse species and the extraordinary artists who have created new music with them. Climate change and biodiversity loss have been linked throughout Earth’s history, but human activities in the modern era are accelerating both at unprecedented rates, with feedback loops worsening both crises.

The dusky seaside sparrow was a songbird once found across the marshlands of southern Florida, especially on Merritt Island and near the St. Johns River. The strange story of its extinction involves both NASA and Disney World. The bird’s major decline started in the 1950’s and 1960’s when efforts were intensified to control mosquito numbers on Merritt Island, where the Kennedy Space Center was being built. This war on mosquitos involved the mass spraying of pesticides (DDT) and the flooding of mosquito-friendly marshland, which was also the sparrow’s breeding habitat.

By 1980, the combined impacts of habitat destruction, pollution, and pesticide use had pushed the species to the brink and only six individuals were known to exist. Worse still - they were all males, the last female having been seen in 1975. Biologists captured these last individuals and had initial success crossbreeding them with a closely related sparrow species. When federal funding for this work was cut, however, the dusky’s advocates were forced to seek alternative support. 

In 1983, the birds found an unlikely ally in Florida’s Walt Disney World, who were looking for new attractions for their Discovery Island Zoological Park. Four of the surviving males were transported to Disney. Past their biological prime, ongoing crossbreeding efforts provided disappointing results, with hatchlings either not surviving or proving infertile.

By the end of March 1986, only a single ‘pure’ dusky called ‘Orange Band’ (all of the final individuals had been named after the colour of the rings on their legs) remained. Though blind in one eye, Orange Band survived at least eight years and possibly up to thirteen, before his death on June 17, 1987. The last few hybrid birds were lost two years later. In the hopes that cloning would someday give scientists a chance of reviving the dusky seaside sparrow, the heart and liver of ‘Orange Band’ was cryopreserved, and his body preserved in alcohol at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

Dusky/Angels was composed by Owen Spafford, and features a recording of the dusky seaside sparrow provided by Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida.

“This piece is made mostly from late night improvisations on the 5-string banjo. I was manipulating the sound of the banjo through a set of pedals and a vintage amp to create a warped sound that feels both familiar and strange. I was working with the feeling that those who die are always with us in some way, and imagining the dusky seaside sparrow as a singing companion that if we listen hard enough for, we might be able to hear. I used a line from the American folk hymn ‘There are Angels Hoverin’ Round’ as a mantra, to both grieve those who are gone and remind us that some part of their essence will always be with us”. - Owen Spafford 

This artistic collaboration was researched and curated for EarthSonic by Merlyn Driver.