Wildlife Conservation Policy Book

For this one, author Mark Jerome Walters returns to his homeland in eastern Florida: Merritt Island and the marshlands of the St. John's, Banana and Indian rivers. As a boy, the dusky seaside sparrow had also lived there, but when he returned to research the book, it was gone, extinct.

Walters writes, "Here I was again, brought back unexpectedly by an extinction that seemed a metaphor for the changed landscape that surrounded me. It all seemed so futile and helplessly inevitable. Who were the losers in this debacle and who, if anyone, were the winners? Did it matter that the dusky was gone; if not why had I written about it? With the sparrow lost, at the very least an interpretation of what had happened to it should be left behind. The eternal void of its absence might at least be partially filled."

Walters details the sad chain of events: DDT, mosquito control and rapid urban development that led to dramatic population losses of the dusky seaside sparrow, a dark streaked songbird that liked salt marshes dominated by broomgrass AND the badly botched recovery orchestrated by well-meaning but hapless wildlife officials that took years formulating a plan that came far, far, far too late.

Thank God I'm not a dusky or I wouldn't be here to write this.

Poignant and tenderly written by someone that cared about the region and the bird.