In front of me a full moon is settling toward the horizon, bright enough to cast shadows. Behind me, the rising sun is just beginning to paint the horizon with cotton candy pinks and purples. At that moment, they seem perfectly balanced, rising and setting in a cosmic dance going back eons. In about ten minutes, the sun will drape the pasture in golden light, giving a honeyed hue to last year’s growth of bluestem grasses, now turned brown with age.

With better light I’ll finally be able to see the bird I’ve been listening to for almost thirty minutes - a Florida Grasshopper Sparrow, a little brown bird with yellow eyebrows and wings tipped with gold. It’s adapted to blend in with the subtle browns and yellows of the grasses it perches on.

The sparrow’s song consists of three quick high-pitched notes followed by a two second rapid buzz. If you’ve lost the upper range of your hearing, you’ll miss it. Even if your hearing is top-notch, you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for its namesake insect.

Peter Matthiessen, author of the wonderful Florida book, Shadow Country, described a cicada call as “a sound as fierce as a sword blade shrieking on a lathe.” The grasshopper sparrow is more subdued than the cicada, perhaps a pocketknife to the cicada’s sword. Its quiet call is even more muted compared to the singing meadowlarks, bobwhites and other creatures awakening with the dawn. But it's spent generation after generation perfecting that call, right here in Florida’s heartland.

The Florida Grasshopper Sparrow is an endangered subspecies - there’s only a couple hundred of them left on earth, and they all live right here in central Florida. Many experts believe it’s the species most likely to go extinct next in the United States, unless drastic measures are taken to protect it.

I’m working for Archbold Biological Station as a research assistant to help take such drastic measures. I’m checking to see if this bird, who we call Mardi, has found a mate to build a nest with. If he has, I’ll need to find the nest, a small basket woven directly into the ground, built against a tuft of grass or another plant. It’s not an easy task, considering this bird has evolved to make its nests almost impossible for predators to find.

Once we find the nest, we’ll put a fence around it to keep predators out. We’ll monitor the progress of the nestlings and put tiny color bands on their legs. Each bird has a unique combination of bands that help us identify individuals later. Mardi’s combination includes purple, green and yellow - the colors of Mardi Gras. We also use boiling water to kill off mounds of invasive red imported fire ants, which can swarm the nest and eat the babies - a threat this bird didn’t evolve to deal with.

The Florida Grasshopper Sparrow is most at home in the Florida dry prairie, an ecosystem just as unique to Florida as this bird. Part of what we’re studying is how well the sparrow can adapt to pastures, which nowadays are the most abundant grasslands around. My study site is Deluca Preserve, a working cattle ranch off Highway 60 in Osceola County.

Photo By: Steven Thyme.

In the early twentieth century, Florida dry prairie covered much of Highlands County, where my great-grandparents settled. The area where a Home Depot now stands once hosted their egg co-op. Over the decades, much of this prairie was transformed into pastures—a change that, while it disrupted habitats for native species such as the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow, also preserved extensive areas of grassland from being developed into housing or commercial properties.

I grew up in Sebring, but as a kid had no idea this bird existed. I spent countless hours on my cousin’s cattle ranch fishing the little marl ponds, pits dug up for clay to help build Highway 27.

Now that I know it’s call, I can’t help but hear it, and whenever I’m in prairies or pastures, I keep my ears open for its tiny piercing call, “with a ring that causes the spider webs to shimmer in the sunlight,” as Peter Matthiessen might put it. I recognize that this little golden flecked sparrow is part of my heritage - yours too.

On hot summer afternoons when the sun is beating down and I’m hauling a fence out to protect another nest or boiling water to treat invasive fire ants, sweat beading down my face and soaking my shirt, I remind myself of this. For if it disappears, it takes with it one more voice from the pasture and prairie, leaving it that much emptier.

As long as the sun continues rising and the moon setting on our beautiful grasslands, the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow belongs too, piercing the dawn with its rattling buzz.