A geyser of dust engulfs the tires of Karl Miller’s silver pickup as the truck comes to an abrupt stop on a narrow dirt trail. Dodging the outstretched jazz hands of palmettos and the tangle of scrub on both sides, he slowly opens the back door to unload two soft, mailbox-size carriers covered with a bedsheet. Each contains precious cargo: a single Florida Scrub-Jay that Miller collected in the predawn gray from Ocala National Forest, just north of Orlando, and drove four hours south to Jonathan Dickinson State Park, an 18-square-mile coastal preserve near Palm Beach. The bonded pair in his truck are valuable not only because they’re among a shrinking number of Florida’s lone endemic bird species, but also because Miller has hand-selected them, along with a few other families, to be a part of an ambitious experiment.
Over the past century, human development in Florida has split the jay’s scrub habitat into ever smaller pieces. Because the blue-and-gray, robin-size bird typically travels no more than five miles from home, this subdivision has shrunk the species’ deep gene pool to a series of tiny puddles. Now Sarah Fitzpatrick, a conservation geneticist at Michigan State University, is collaborating with Miller at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission to translocate 5 to 10 scrub-jays from Ocala to Jonathan Dickinson (or JD, as the locals call it). The pair’s hope is that the offspring of the Ocala birds will mate with those at JD, giving subsequent generations a much-needed boost of fresh DNA.
This strategy, called genetic rescue, is neither high-tech nor new, but it is still relatively untested. Scientists have long hesitated to play God with the genes of wild animals, preferring to let evolution manage itself. But several small-scale successes using the tactic in the 1990s, including with the Florida panther and Greater Prairie-Chicken, have made the strategy a more palatable option for species that may be circling the drain. “We’re in such early
