The endangered Cape Sable Seaside Sparrow, only found in the Everglades, gets federal protections that during the summer rainy season can lead to draining water out to sea to avoid drowning nests.
Nature - in the form of a tiny, rare songbird - sometimes gets in the way of saving the Everglades.
During this rainy summer, some of the water that could help rehydrate South Florida's famed River of Grass instead gets drained out to sea to avoid drowning the endangered Cape Sable Seaside Sparrow.
The five-inch bird - usually heard but not seen because of its size - nests on the ground. That can put the federally-protected bird in the path of where stormwater could otherwise get pumped to Everglades National Park.
To protect those nests, water gets held in conservation areas north of the park and when those areas fill up, more water than usual gets drained out to sea.
"We have had to kind of bleed some of that (water) out to tide," said Tommy Strowd, director of operations for the South Florida Water Management District. "There's no place to put it."
Of course, this wasted water isn't the sparrow's fault.
Decades of draining the Everglades and other man-made intrusions shrunk the bird's habitat and put its population at threat of extinction.
Many of the long-promised fixes that are part of back-logged Everglades restoration have yet to be completed.
Finishing reservoirs and other water storage areas planned for restoration are among the long-term solutions to protecting the sparrow and getting more water to the Everglades.
"The hope is we don't (just) have these little pieces of habitat we are trying to save," said Julie Hill-Gabriel of Audubon of Florida.
Keeping the sparrows nests dry can have damaging environmental consequences for other endangered species that call the Everglades home.
For example, holding back water that would otherwise flow south can make nesting harder for the also endangered Everglades snail kite, which nests along the water's edge.
Also, dumping water out to sea means less water available for the Everglades to get through the next dry season.
Federal and state officials need to come up with a more flexible water management approach that doesn't pit one species against another, and doesn't waste water that could be hydrating the Everglades, according to Audubon.
"Look at a bigger picture," Hill-Gabriel said. "Make sure we are not having negative consequences for other endangered species."
The Everglades is the only place Cape Sable Seaside Sparrows can be found and there are only about 3,300 of the birds left, according to estimates from Everglades National Park.
The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Serves calls the sparrows "secretive and hard-to-observe" birds, with dark olive-gray and brown feathers on their backs, white throats and yellow feathers in front of their eyes and at the bend of their wings.
The sparrows are referred to as the "Goldilocks bird" because conditions have to be just right for their survival.
They nest in small clumps of grass in areas near the coast or in inland prairies, which are naturally flood-prone.
The problem is the flooding that used to be a natural part of the sparrows' life cycle now brings the threat of extinction because their numbers have dropped so low.
That's why redirecting water flows to protect the birds has become a part of South Florida's water supply balancing act.
South Florida relies on a vast system of canals, levees and pump stations to guard against flooding of farms and neighborhoods on land that used to be the Everglades.
Drainage system capacity limits and sparrow protections are "constraints" to getting more water to the Everglades, Strowd said. Everglades restoration projects are eventually expected to "alleviate" those constraints, he said.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service disputes that protecting the sparrow is to blame for stopping water from getting to the Everglades.
Everglades water problems are primarily due to the lack of water storage and man-made barriers to natural water flows, such as the Tamiami Trail, according to U.S. Fish & Wildlife spokesman Ken Warren
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