Dusky seaside sparrow
Conservation Status: Extinct
Tracks featuring this species:
Owen Spafford - ‘Dusky/Angels’
The dusky seaside sparrow (Ammospiza maritima nigrescens) 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’ (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.
Illustration By: Vickie Amarilis
Climate connections
While the extinction of the dusky seaside sparrow was not connected to climate change, its fate reminds us of the fragility of life and biodiversity as a whole.
Climate change and biodiversity loss have been linked throughout Earth’s history, but human activities in the modern age are rapidly accelerating both, threatening the life-support systems for humans and other species. The interconnections between biodiversity loss and climate change means that finding solutions to one of these crises helps to mitigate the other.
Read more about the connections between biodiversity loss and climate change.
