Knee-deep in water, the young man lifts his arms. 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. The idea was hers: a fake club with joke rituals.
It is “a little bit of joy”, she says later, for the people who care enough to master an extremely difficult skill: finding hidden eggs laid by a tiny ground-nesting bird before the sea can swallow them.
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.
“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.
A ragtag crew of citizen scientists and researchers, they tinker with low-cost, homegrown solutions to save saltmarsh sparrow chicks from drowning during extreme high tides. They try, fail and tweak in their efforts to raise nests beyond the water’s reach.
A plastic coffee filter that costs $6 (£4.50) glued to foam pads proves to be a buoyant life raft for nests that would otherwise flood. There is elation when some of the contraptions, dubbed “arks”, begin to work, raising the grassy homes like a tiny elevator, going up and down with the tides.
The small team works under restrictive wildlife permits on a shoestring budget, raising 53 nests and tracking 97 untouched control nests. Not every nest that needs a lift along this shore will get one.
Painful timelapse videos show waters rising on hatchlings in nests that Robinson’s team have found but, ultimately, could not save from drowning.
Extreme tides, driven by rising sea levels, are flooding marshes across the east coast to new heights. Soaring populations of white-tailed deer are an additional threat. The deer are omnivorous and have been captured on trail cams snacking on saltmarsh sparrow eggs.
Saltmarsh sparrow numbers have fallen by 87% since 1998, according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service. The population is shrinking so fast – by about 9% a year – that the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species classified them as endangered in 2017.
Most experts doubt the species can survive beyond the mid-century. One team of scientists predicts that extinction could happen within 10 years.
But climate breakdown and deer did not start the sparrows’ problems. They simply fanned the flame.
No sugarcoating
Saltmarsh sparrows are a specialist species: they cannot nest anywhere but salt marshes.
Centuries ago – before European colonists dried, ditched and destroyed much of the United States’ salt marshes – the speckled birds with their signature orange caps built nests in the highest reaches of the marsh.
Proximity to water helped them avoid some predators, and their unique canopied nests allowed eggs, especially during the king tides – the very highest ones of the year – to float for a few hours while still being contained.
Historically, these nurseries only flooded twice a month: during new and full moons when tides are at their fullest.
In the early 1800s, as human settlements expanded, began filling in the high marsh began to be filled in, slowly pushing the sparrows to more low-lying areas or out of the marsh entirely. Two centuries of development destroyed half of Rhode Island’s original salt marshes and what is left is being pummelled by the effects of rising seas: increased salinity, more frequent flooding and longer-lasting storm surges. Eggs float away; fledglings slip beneath the water.
The arks are a last-ditch intervention to address a human-made problem, but are not without controversy.
By making sparrows more visible to predators, “lifting nests could cause harm”, says Prof Chris Elphick, a conservation biologist at the University of Connecticut. Female sparrows are also known to abandon nests if they perceive threats.
Elphick says you have to “balance the risks and benefits” of this kind of extreme intervention. But he sees a future, sometime after a population crash – which his lab predicts will happen in the next decade or so – where nest-raising may be beneficial in salvaging the species’ last individuals.
Robinson acknowledges that lifting nests is a “tough sell”. But unpublished findings from the group’s two-year experiment found that the arks worked: only 8% of artificially raised nests flooded during extreme tides compared with 18% of untouched nests. None of the raised nests were abandoned, and the contraptions did not appear to affect chicks being eaten by deer and other predators.
White, who is now a research assistant, is aware that the arks are not a long-term solution. Their preliminary success at Jacob’s Point has not changed his view that this species will probably become extinct in his lifetime.
“You have to be as realistic as possible because, if you sugarcoat it, people aren’t going to take [the bird’s extinction] as seriously as it actually is,” says White.
Waiting for protection
Despite the fact that they are classified as endangered internationally, saltmarsh sparrows are not yet listed as such under US law. Federal officials have been reviewing the species’ case for years. If listed, it would be a boon for the birds, but experts are not holding their breath.
Elphick says: “We expected a decision back in 2019. We’re still waiting.”
In the US, endangered species are afforded the highest level of protection. For saltmarsh sparrows, it would mean encroaching coastal developments or plans to build docks could be scuttled.
In South Carolina, for example, work on an 18,000-home development next to a pristine salt marsh has been frozen since 2023, after scientists found endangered bats were living in a nearby national forest.
Being listed as endangered unlocks funding, too – sometimes millions of dollars – to support habitat restoration or improve scientific monitoring. In 2020, the US government spent $871,000 on conservation efforts for the endangered Cape Sable seaside sparrow, endemic to Florida, while more than $7m went on helping the red-cockaded woodpecker.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service was due to make a decision on the endangered status of the saltmarsh sparrow by the end of 2024, according to its website. An agency spokesperson refused to provide a revised timeline. “While we do set targets for when we think listing determinations will be made, we also re-evaluate and adjust the targets,” the US Fish and Wildlife Service said via email.
Experts believe it is likely that the saltmarsh sparrows will be listed as endangered only after it is too late for them to recover. One study found that, between 2000 and 2009, the average wait for declining species to be classified as endangered was about nine years.
From 2010 to 2020, decision-making sped up, with species waiting an average of three years. Under the Trump administration, experts expect another slowdown.
Like patients bleeding to death in a hospital waiting room, hundreds of species such as the saltmarsh sparrow sit in the classification queue, leaving researchers resorting to cheap remedies such as the $6 nest-lifting devices.
Robinson, who has been researching the sparrows at Jacob’s Point for nearly a decade, describes her role as like providing hospice care. “I see myself playing the role of bearing witness,” she says.
While the ark experiment may give the impression that Robinson believes she can turn the tide for saltmarsh sparrows, she has in fact made peace with their probable extinction. For her, the team’s experiments brought “fun” and “smiles” and, for dozens of nests, temporary relief from the harms of the climate crisis.
“Don’t ever underestimate what a small, thoughtful, dedicated group of citizens can do to change the world. In fact, that’s the only thing that ever has,” says Robinson, loosely quoting the anthropologist Margaret Meade.
Perhaps all that sparrow tracking and ark-building was not ultimately for the birds alone. Reflecting on the 10-year project, Robinson says: “I find myself comparing the importance of sharing our [scientific] findings … with the value of fledging young scientists-to-be. It is hard to assign a value to these efforts, but at least we showed up for all of it.”
There are still about 20,000 salt marsh sparrows left globally, according to Elphick. And, last month, his research group published some good news: the species’ annual rate of decline has slowed – for now.
White, now 21 and in his final year studying wildlife biology at the University of New Hampshire, says: “Even if the sparrow does go extinct eventually, this work sets the baseline for things that can be done about it.
“And things can change for other birds.”
Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow the biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield in the Guardian app for more nature coverage