One Small Misstep for Man. . . : A SHADOW AND A SONG; The Struggle To Save an Endangered Species <i> By Mark Jerome Walters</i> , (Putnam: $29.95; 672 pp.)

“Wild birds are not in the protection of anyone.” --Oliver Wendell Holmes

The debate over the federal Endangered Species Act, up for reauthorization early next year, is on. Already the question is being defined as a Hobson’s choice between progress or the status quo, jobs or the environment, people or wildlife. Framed in this way, endangered species protection seems a luxury that, in hard economic times, we simply can’t afford. If the extinction of one small songbird, for example, were an unavoidable cost of the Apollo 11 moon landing--achieved in July 1969 in what the then-President Nixon called “the greatest week in the history of the world since creation”--even many conservationists might be tempted to swallow hard and look the other way.

In “A Shadow and A Song: The Struggle to Save an Endangered Species,” Mark Jerome Walters confronts precisely that choice by documenting the development of the Kennedy Space Center and the resulting extinction of the Dusky Seaside Sparrow, a small, richly colored, white-breasted, yellow-winged songbird that lived for thousands of years in the salt marshes and broom-grass on and around Merritt Island in Brevard County, Florida.

The choice, it turns out, is false. The decline of the dusky was preventable, the result of neglect by the federal agency charged with protection of our nation’s wildlife heritage. Pressured by NASA, and preoccupied with protecting ducks and other waterfowl, the untied States Fish and Wildlife Service not only failed to protect the species but affirmatively prevented last minute efforts by wildlife biologists to preserve it. With the active support of the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Dusky Seaside Sparrow was literally studied to death.

Against the backdrop of the space program, Walters imparts a wealth of technical information (from the taxonomy of sparrows and mosquitoes to the vegetation and history of critical habitat to the construction process for launch facilities), but this is not the dry detail of ornithology textbooks. The vivid cast of characters includes Jack Salmela, director of mosquito abatement in Brevard County, who after crashing his spray plane had first into the ground from 60 feet, “limped to the highway, and hitched a ride into town. Here was a man with the stuff to fight mosquitoes”; or Jim Baker, the Fish and Wildlife biologist appointed to head the dusky recovery team, who loved Bavarian polka music, boasted a cholesterol count of 305, and had “shot so many ducks that he was partially deaf in his right ear”; or Brian Sharp, the foremost expert on the dusky, who was excluded from Fish and Wildlife recovery efforts in part because he and his wife were caught skinny dipping on Merritt Island, after which his credentials as “real Fish and Wildlife material ... were pretty much gone.”

Through these and other characters, Walters describes the social and economic forces unleashed by the transformation of a small U.S. Air Force test rocket launch facility into the apex of the United States space program. With construction of the Beeline Expressway during the 1960s and ‘70s through prime dusky habitat near the launching areas, developers and speculators knew that adjacent land “was a swamp with a future.” Miles of salt march gave way to new highways, new cities, and millions of tourists. As the space program took on major significance in the Cold War, the “horrendous mosquitoes” that enveloped it had to go, first by DDT and later by the diking and flooding of their salt marsh breeding grounds. Mosquito abatement became a mission and its officers the heroes in a holy war. By 1957, up to 70% of the duskies in the areas sprayed were gone along with the mosquitoes, and the scientific community began to recognize mounting threat to survival of the species.

But the Fish and Wildlife Service was no match for NASA, despite the enactment of the first endangered species legislation in the late 1960s and the more rigorous Endangered Species Act in 1973. Although the dusky was listed as endangered in 1967, the mandatory recovery program initiated in 1975 was a disaster from the start. The critical recovery team was headed by Jim Baker, the well-meaning, polka-loving biologist with little knowledge of the Dusky Seaside Sparrow and few qualifications beyond an unquestionably sincere love of duck-hunting. After two years of study, the team produced an anemic 15-page report with recommendations as obvious as “maintain and develop existing and selected potential habitat; restore and maintain optimum population ... develop public awareness ... and monitor population levels by periodic surveys.” The nation’s foremost expert on the species, excluded from the recovery team, was exiled to Portland, Oregon. And the ultimate failure of the recovery plan was no surprise.

By 1980, only five male duskies and no known females remained. When representative of interested organizations, including state and federal wildlife agencies, met on Merritt Island to consider the dwindling options, they unanimously agreed to try hybridization--a largely untested process of “backcrossing” the five surviving male duskies with a closely related Seaside Sparrow subspecies to develop eventually, scientists believed, “an almost pure” dusky. For reasons not entirely clear, however, the Fish and Wildlife Service, after a change of heart, said no, preferring to wait and hope that a female dusky could be found. Not until 1983, when Disney World agreed to fund the effort, did the agency finally release the duskies and allow backcrossing to proceed. By then almost 12-years-old, the elderly songbirds couldn’t produce enough fertile eggs.

The Dusky Seaside Sparrow was the needless victim of powerful economic and social forces not unlike those that now threaten the Spotted Owl of the Pacific Northwest, the Winter-Run Chinook Salmon of the Upper Sacramento River, the California Gnatcatcher of the Southern California coast, or any of the up to 50,000 species lost each year. Although the Endangered Species Act exists to balance these forces--to ensure that we coexist with, rather than sacrifice, our diversity--it is only as good as the agency that enforces it. The Fish and Wildlife Service could have saved the dusky by limited, reasonable, and timely protection of its habitat, not just an agreement to study, not just a conference to discuss, and not just a resolution to consider.

This is an important lesson of “A Shadow and a Song.” Describing the political success acclaimed when local mosquito control officials agreed to study alternative mosquito management procedures, Walters observe that “the ‘study’ gave the appearance of action while interfering as little as possible with the doings at Mosquito Control.” In that way “the credible vocabulary of science had ben appropriated to mask political motives. A political arrangement came to be known as a ‘study.’ And an exercise in lethal research was camouflaged by the words ‘conservation’ and ‘preservation.”’ Walters asks the obvious question: “What was the virtue of political victory when the goal of saving the dusky was lost in the process?”

As reauthoriation of the Endangered Species Act is fdebated in the coming months, that question is fundamental. Develoeprs are poised to gut its protective structure and language. Conservationists are equally determined, if not to strengthen the act, at least to preserve what protection it now offers. In the inevitable struggle for a political compromise, the tale of the Dusky Seaside Sparrow will provide a sad reminder of what is at stake.