A little bit of joy': can tiny rafts save endangered sparrows from rising seas?

"His wrists are grabbed, next his ankles, then he feels himself flying through the air, nearly horizontal, before plunging into New England's pungent tidal waters. Grinning and still dripping, he receives a homemade certificate documenting his induction into the Needle in a Haystack Society. That was fun, sighs Deirdre Robinson, a 75-year-old naturalist, after helping to toss the intern, Cooper White, into the water."

"It took a month of training before White identified his first saltmarsh sparrow nest. It was tiny, perched an inch above the dark mud, with a canopy of spartina grass intricately threaded over it. Standing waist-high in the emerald marsh grass that hugs Rhode Island's coastline, White remembers the adrenaline rush he felt at finding it. These are some of the best-hidden nests in the avian world, woven by one of North America's most rapidly disappearing birds."

"And, despite White's joyful baptism, there is little talk of salvation. Between Moon Tides: hacking nature to save the saltmarsh sparrow It's very likely by mid-century, the saltmarsh sparrow will be extinct, Robinson says. A new Guardian documentary, Between Moon Tides, follows Robinson and her dedicated interns over two summers at Jacob's Point Preserve, a 15-hectare (37-acre) tidal salt marsh about 60 miles from Boston."

Deirdre Robinson leads interns and citizen scientists at Jacob's Point Preserve to find and protect saltmarsh sparrow nests. Trainees learn to locate tiny, well-camouflaged nests woven into spartina grass just above tidal mud. Teams test low-cost, homegrown interventions aimed at raising nests or otherwise preventing chick drownings during extreme high tides. They iterate after failures, adjusting designs and techniques. The saltmarsh sparrow is rapidly declining because of rising tides and habitat loss, with extinction likely by mid-century without successful, scalable conservation measures. The work relies on field skill, volunteer labor, and adaptive tinkering in a threatened coastal marsh.

Read at www.theguardian.com