Of a Fire on The Marsh
IN ALL MY LIFE, it might be the thing I’ve looked for hardest, apart from unrelenting love. A bird: not big or bright, no bird of paradise, no pheasant of Tibet. Instead, a sparrow, a meager lump not quite come into focus in a misty lens. I saw it only once, half a lifetime ago. It’s haunted me ever since, hag of my heart.
APRIL 15, 1980
By some measures the morning is voluptuous. Apocalypses are first of all voluptuous, no end of scenic calamities: flesh and muck, fire and monsters. Nothing burns now, but breezes sweep the salt marsh, sprites forming in swirls. Ghosts come and go in a weave of cordgrass.
Salt marsh covers the St. Johns River valley in Florida, not that any valley is evident. All’s level, to look at it. At sunrise we start out on foot: Mike Delany, who’s mapped out the morning’s search, the first of many; Beau Sauselein, who works every day in the marsh, worrying about sparrows; myself bobbling a limp notebook.
The marsh stretches out of sight, crossed by a misty strip of palms and a power line. We move along a dike, sorting out a babel of birdsong: the melody of the meadowlark, the maracas of the red-winged blackbird, the double-dactyl line of the yellowthroat.
Electric, but all the wrong birds. A meadowlark swoops past, sunlight on its lemon breast. Delany rocks back like an onlooker at a rocket launch.
“Thank God,” he says, “we’re not losing that one.”
There it is—the slip, from a sparrow man, that a sparrow wasn’t the worst thing to lose. I might have said it myself, without thinking, if I’d thought of it.
We slide down off the dike and push through the cordgrass—elastic, knee-deep clumps that push right back. I step on a clump, and deftly it dumps me in the mud, where I lie a long moment looking at the sky. The plan is to walk abreast, 25 meters apart, stopping often for Delany with a tape player to broadcast a birdsong, like the redwing’s but less forceful. To my ear (in birds we hear what we want to hear) it’s please see meeeee. “They answer after four or five tries,” says Sauselein, a red dragonfly looping around him, “or not at all.”
Who has heard the dusky seaside sparrow, or even heard of it? I’ve never caught a note or glimpse of it myself, and 1980 may be too late. A U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service news release cites the dusky as perhaps the most endangered species in America. No matter: the media dilate on condors and crocodiles. Sparrows lack resonance. We think of that denizen of eaves and downspouts, the house sparrow, gracing sidewalk cafés with cloacal graffiti. The dusky, by contrast, sticks to the marshes within a few miles of Titusville, Florida. In the scant existing photos, it’s a natty creature, dark on top, chocolate to black, with breast streaks of those same shades on white. Ahead of the eye is a bright wedge of saffron. Elegant. Still, a sparrow.
On this Tax Day, we’re on the St. Johns National Wildlife Refuge, acquired for the dusky at a cost of $2.6 million. A fortune for a sparrow, recalling Richard III’s kingdom for a horse, but was it enough? This also is the first day of a two-month search for the dusky, whose entire population might fit in your pocket. Moreover, no female has been seen
