Three Duskies Remain : Tiny Birds Soon to Sing Swan Songs

They are the last three duskies on earth, each just an ounce of bird no bigger than a canary.

Thousands of them once flew free over the broad savanna of the St. Johns River Valley. They began to vanish as the vast, hypnotic salt marsh was lost to ranches and houses and the highway that cuts through its heart.

Now the last of the dusky seaside sparrows have been taken from those bruised grasslands 30 miles away and brought here to a place more symbolic of the new Florida, to Discovery Island in Disney World, only a short boat ride from the Magic Kingdom and the looping monorail.

Under Disney Protection

For a year now, the tiny sparrows have lived under Disney protection, sheltered like irreplaceable art, hidden from strolling tourists by a thicket of cabbage palms. The dusky is likely the world’s most endangered creature: The three that remain are males.

Named Yellow, Orange and White for the plastic bands fastened to their legs, the birds are kept in screened cages, 8 by 10 feet. In this oddest of hospices, they dine twice a day on crickets, mealworms and seeds. Overhead sprinklers bathe them in simulated rain showers. Familiar spartina grass, stiff and sharp-edged, covers the ground.

A less conventional comfort also has been provided for the doomed birds, already twice the age of duskies that lived in the wild. With no female from the subspecies left, each of the monogamous duskies has been coupled with the next best thing, a Scott’s seaside sparrow, a cousin from Florida’s Gulf Coast.

This is a genetic experiment known as back-crossing. The idea is to mate each generation of offspring with the remaining purebreds. This will produce 75%, then 87.5%, then 93.75% duskies and so on.

Hybrid Resembles Original

“A three-quarter dusky looks just like the original, authentic bird,” said Charlie Cook, a one-time divinity student who is now the curator of the Discovery Island bird refuge. “An ornithologist can hardly tell the difference, though you might find some egghead who’d disagree. Everything beyond 75% is splitting hairs.”

Disney was asked to host the project by the Florida Audubon Society, with approval from the state. Only the federal government, which over the years spent $5 million in a failed effort to save the sparrow, has been half-hearted about the back-crossing program.

“Legally, a 98.4% dusky isn’t a dusky,” Harold O’Connor, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said when the breeding program was first proposed. “The bird we would get through cross-breeding would not be the bird we are losing. It would not be an endangered species.”

Lawyers with the U.S. Department of the Interior agreed. Money set aside to save the endangered dusky cannot be used to breed the dusky with something else, they advised.

This experiment, then, is merely tolerated by the Fish and Wildlife Service. For federal purposes, the dusky is a battle lost, a name soon to be scratched from the list of 823 endangered species and numbered among the extinct.

“Our only position is that any offspring of the cross-breeding project cannot be released on federal lands,” said John Christian, the Fish and Wildlife official in charge of the endangered species program in the Southeast.

Actually, there may never be enough offspring to release back into the tidal marsh. Few chicks have come from the aged duskies and the unfamiliar female sparrows beside them.

“Lots of bad luck,” Cook said with a worried shudder.

When the duskies arrived at Disney World, there were four of them, including the one nicknamed Old Shaky, wobbliest of the oldtimers.

Given female companionship, the venerable sparrow responded eagerly at first. He displayed himself--standing straight up, fluttering his wings, singing her his song. But Old Shaky was stiff-legged from gout. He tumbled over onto the ground. Then he never tried again.

Last June, Old Shaky died. An autopsy showed kidney failure.

“Poor guy never looked right,” said Herb Kale, the society’s dusky expert and an animal ecologist.

Then there is White. Things start fine. Hooding his wings, he displays himself well. Playing her natural role, the female pretends to be indifferent. Things, however, go no further.

“Females either don’t accept him or he gives up too soon,” Lisa Trimble, one of the keepers, said regretfully.

Frustrations Continue

Yellow has been almost as much a frustration. He likes his partner well enough. She is 50% dusky-- born when five duskies remained and state biologists, without permission, tried a brief breeding program in 1980.

During the recent April-to-August mating season, the couple produced eight clutches of grape-sized eggs. All of them were infertile until the sixth.

Then two chicks finally were hatched. They lived only a few days before being pitched from the nest. Tiny bruises on their necks showed that one of the parents had killed them.

The same thing happened with two more chicks, all too young to have been separated from their mother and raised by humans.

“They seemed to be fighting over the young,” Kale speculated.

But finally the parents let a chick survive. If that 75% dusky turns out to be a female, something its keepers won’t know until the spring, she will be the great hope for another breeding season.

Orange, too, fathered a healthy chick in September, and for a while, this seemed the best news in an otherwise dismal year. He was paired with a 75% dusky, also born from the earlier breeding. The newborn, then, was the first hybrid 87.5% pure.

“It was 3 weeks old, doing fine,” Cook said, telling the story slowly.

“We checked it at 9 a.m,” Cook said. An hour later, the sparrow was found dead on its back, its legs in the air. The autopsy indicated that it broke its neck, probably in a clumsy effort to fly. More disappointing, the post-mortem showed that the chick was a female, the stepway to a 93.75% bird.

“For a while, we thought we were moving right along,” Cook said.

Age Critical Factor

Swift success is essential. The guesswork is that the duskies are 8 to 11 years old, very near the outer limit of their lifespans.

“We couldn’t even think of releasing them in the wild unless we had several hundred (hybrid) birds,” Kale, of Audubon, said. “It just isn’t happening.”

He pulled out a tray from a locked cabinet in his office. Inside were rows of stuffed seaside sparrows, stiff and brown.

Each subspecies has slightly different markings. The dusky is the color of dark mud, with dabs of saffron yellow in front of its eyes and at the bend of its wings.

“Not many people came out fighting for a tiny little bird few people had even seen,” Kale said. “Not many, and then it was too late.”

Once Thrived in Wild

During the first half of this century, the duskies were thriving in their only narrow habitat, the St. Johns basin and nearby Merritt Island. But for a few pioneer settlements, man was barely a presence.

Then, in the late 1950s, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration began buying up Merritt Island, a favored spot for what would become the Kennedy Space Center--and, until then, prime dusky territory.

Actually, NASA had strong reservations about the marsh location. It was impossibly thick with mosquitoes. Researchers measured them by landings-per-minute--how many would land on a man in that time. The average was 1,000.

With NASA money, experts sprayed insecticides, casually poisoning duskies along with the mosquitoes. Then they flooded the marsh, so the mosquitoes would have no muddy shallows for laying eggs.

While that change of the landscape did solve the mosquito problem, it deprived the dusky of its natural places to hide, the dry ground sprouting with cord grass.

Development Continued

Several years passed before anyone even noticed that the Merritt Island duskies were nearly gone. Then, by the late 1960s, yet more development was purging the dusky from the entire valley.

In 1969, Herb Kale organized an emergency symposium about the dwindling sparrows. By then, a few environmentalists had become concerned about the besieged bird.

Other, more powerful interests, however, also had plans for the marsh that was becoming prime land. The dusky was being pinched from every side. Ranchers set their cattle loose on drained land. Rows of houses were laid right across the floodplain. An arm of the Bee Line Expressway, connecting Orlando to the cities rapidly prospering from the space boom, would soon split the dusky’s largest remaining habitat.

“Really, I don’t know what could have been done unless we’d have bought the entire St. Johns River basin,” said Bill Leenhouts, a biologist with Fish and Wildlife.

Kale said, “We raised a fuss about the dusky, but not everyone was that concerned. Most minds were on dollar signs.”

Newspapers editorialized against “bird-watchers” who were trying to stymie growth. Local chambers of commerce fumed at any mention of the dusky. Even the local Audubon Society in Brevard County, Fla., Kale said, was slow to champion the cause.

Then, in 1973, Congress passed the landmark Endangered Species Act. Money became available to purchase a dusky refuge. Slowly, the government began buying up 6,100 acres.

“Maybe this is a cop-out for Fish and Wildlife because we tried and failed, but there was no way to turn things around with all that was happening to the ecosystem,” Leenhouts said.

By the time Congress acted, biologists believed that less than 100 dusky pairs were left.

More havoc was to come.

In 1973, 1975 and 1976, wildfires burned across 80% of the dusky refuge. That final year was the last time a dusky female or any evidence of nesting was seen.

In the spring of 1979 and the fall of 1980, biologists searched across Merritt Island and the St. Johns Valley for what remained of the sparrow. This time, the plan was to capture the duskies in fine-meshed mist nets.

Altogether, six birds were rounded up. Another was left in the wild to sing his mating song from the top of the stiff grass. If there was a female out there, it was hoped he would find her. But not even he has been seen since.

“This may be just a nondescript little sparrow, but it is also a natural work of art, one-of-a-kind, irreplaceable,” said Cook, of Disney World, which has made no effort to display the duskies.

Yet the irreplaceable bird is certainly lost. Even if the few hybrids multiply and thrive, there is no guarantee they can survive in what is left of the fragile savanna. After all, the pure dusky could not.

In captivity, the hybrid dusky would at least preserve some of the extinct sparrow’s genes, and biologists say the riddles of medical science are sometimes solved from such obscure sources.

“You never know what kind of unique products can come from genetic material,” said Dr. George Gee, a physiologist at the federal Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, Md.

The last duskies on earth will live their final days at Disney World--hopping and pecking inside cages custom-built to seem like the marsh.

They will go comfortably into extinction, special guests here in America’s favorite fantasy land.