866 us. NATIONAL MUSEUM BULLETIN 23 7 tart 2 



can be extremely destructive to any bird life in their path, as the 

 report of W. B. Robertson, Jr. (1961) on the 1960 hurricane Donna 

 shows. When the rising waters drive the sparrows from their marsh 

 habitat during daylight, the birds have a good chance of reaching 

 and riding out the blow in the protection of vegetation on higher land. 

 This the Cape Sable birds doubtless did during the 1926 hurricane, the 

 center of which passed over Miami, and during a less severe one that 

 passed over Cape Sable by day in 1929. Howell (1932) quotes a 

 letter from J. B. Semple dated Jan. 3, 1930: "The Cape Sable Seaside 

 Sparrow is still in its old haunts in the long grass, notwithstanding 

 that last October five feet of salt water driven by a wind of about 100 

 miles per hour, passed over the entire range of this little bird." 



The birds were not so fortunate when the hurricane of Sept. 2, 1935, 

 one of the most violent storms on record in the western hemisphere, 

 bit Cape Sable. That hurricane struck at night, and the sudden wall 

 of water at least 8 feet deep it drove before it must have caught the 

 birds asleep with their toes locked around their grass stem perches. 

 As I (1956) explained elsewhere: "It seems incredible that any small 

 sparrow could have escaped alive. If any sparrow did manage to get 

 into the air when that eight foot wave struck, it would have been 

 blown to sea towards the center of the storm and would have dropped 

 from exhaustion into the waters of the Gulf * * *. To my knowl- 

 edge no reliable reports have ever come from that part of the coast of 

 the presence of this species since the storm." And to this day the 

 birds have failed to move back into the area where Howell first found 

 them, which is now completely under the jurisdiction and protection of 

 Everglades National Park. 



Most if not all their present range was completely inundated by the 

 floods accompanying hurricane Donna in 1960. Donna passed Cape 

 Sable at daybreak on September 10. Her center proceeded north- 

 eastward along the coast and struck Ochopee and Everglades City 

 about noon, ravaging vegetation and damaging property. Yet the 

 birds managed to escape her effects somewhere nearby, because I 

 found them in several places along the Ochopee marshes in 1961 and 

 1962. 



Fires, whether started by man or lightning, are a serious if not a 

 catastrophic threat to the species, as Sutton (in Holt and Sutton, 

 1926) noted long ago: "However, it is weU to mention the constant 

 danger of extermination of this colony by fire. * * * It is quite 

 possible that the whole area might be devastated by a single blaze." 

 I (1961) described the destruction by fire of colonies in the Lostmans 

 Pine Islands section in 1957 and in the Ochopee marsh in May 1959. 

 O. L. Austin, Jr., also mentions the Ochopee fire in his previously 

 quoted letter which continues: "Five weeks later, 6 June 1959, I 



