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  • No Heart, No Moon
  • Matt Jones (bio)

The space race killed the sparrow.

Of course, there were other factors.

There was the decision in '46 by the Brevard Mosquito Control District to slather the Merritt Island salt marshes in DDT dropped aerially from a No. 2 diesel fuel carrier.

Then, because the mosquitoes grew resistant to DDT, there was the application of BHC and Dieldrin and Malathion.

There was brand name FLIT, a petroleum derivative, the same stuff that was sprayed over the Spanish moss that hung from the rafters of the Rhythm Club in Natchez the night the one-story building went up in flames killing 209 people.

There was Paris Green powdered finely over the dikes, the same stuff that killed Parisian rats; the same popular pigment used in the paintings of Cézanne and Van Gogh; the same crystalline powder that, despite its name, gave fireworks their blue hue.

There was the direct and indirect poisoning from various insecticides. The physiological problems. The eggshell thinning. The reproductive failures.

There were the dikes themselves. The impoundments built up along Banana Creek and Banana River. The flooding of the salt marshes to drown out the mud-loving mosquitoes.

There was the railroad causeway that went up just north of Roach Hole in 1963.

There was the loss and degradation of habitat. The disappearance of cordgrass and seashore saltgrass.

There was the invasion of dense sea myrtle and snakes and raccoon and aggressive redwing blackbirds.

There were the controlled burns.

And the flooding. So much flooding.

The Orlando Jetport that opened to the public in 1962.

There was the SR 528, otherwise known as the Martin B. Anderson Beachline Expressway: the Bee Line that stretches from the Space Coast all the way to Disney. [End Page 476]

And make no mistake: Disney was involved.

But more than anything, the fate of the dusky seaside sparrow was intertwined with the space race that started sometime around '55 with Khruschev, Sputnik, Yuri Gagarin, Kennedy, and that Special Message to Congress on Urgent National Needs in which JFK so boldly declared, "It will not be one man going to the moon—if we make this judgment affirmatively, it will be an entire nation."

That was the real deathblow to the dusky seaside sparrow: man's ambition. The year NASA purchased most of North Merritt Island, where the largest colony of dusky seaside sparrows lived, was the same year John F. Kennedy stood in front of a crowd of thirty-five thousand people at Rice Stadium in Houston, Texas, and said, "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."

Many ornithologists had observed that these particular birds, no larger than canaries, their feathers black-and-white, kept a limited range for hunting, nesting, and habitation. They were known for their unique tendency to stay close to home. They were a nonmigratory species. So perhaps—just maybe—the duskies were also responsible for their own demise. Perhaps they were simply either unwilling or unable to adapt. Maybe they simply lacked the boldness that made us humans consider leaving our first and only home.

But as surely as Americans would one day step foot on the moon, so, too, would the dusky seaside sparrow travel beyond the land it had always known, touching down finally about an hour west across the center of the Sunshine State in what was then being touted as "The Vacation Kingdom of the World."

________

After he journeyed to the center of the earth, but before he traveled twenty thousand leagues beneath the sea, science fiction author Jules Verne set his sights on outer space.

Following the end of the American Civil War, Verne released the fourth book in his Extraordinary Voyages series: From the Earth to the Moon. In it, members of the Baltimore Gun Club attempt to...

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