Saving Florida’s rarest bird
IT is early morning in one of the largest tracts of Florida dry prairie. A chorus of insects fills the dark chilled air, and heavy dew soaks through my pants as I carefully navigate thick underbrush. I make slow and calculated movements. After nearly an hour of hiking through the ecosystem, Rebecca Schneider, sparrow biologist with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC), abruptly tells me to stop in my tracks. “We are here,” she whispers, glancing down at her GPS. I peer out into the golden prairie, seeing only the gentle waving of grass, welcoming the sunrise.
We are on the search for one of the rarest birds in the world — the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow. It’s an endangered subspecies of the widespread Grasshopper Sparrow found only in central Florida’s dry prairies and pastures.
The bird is cryptic, preferring to hop along the ground and hide among dense prairie grasses. Delicate mottled rusty feathers leading to a small yellow brow atop their head make the birds nearly invisible against the backdrop of the wild prairie plants. Experts say that fewer than 30
