The 1997 Annual Report on the Cape Sable Seaside Sparrow
Pimm SL. 1997. The 1997 Annual Report on the Cape Sable Seaside Sparrow
Our yearly reports have grown continuously as we accumulate more information on the Cape Sable sparrow. This year's report is a set of several documents that we label "chapters" for convenience. For the first time, four of these are manuscripts that have been (or we hope soon will be) accepted for publication in major international journals. Other chapters are technical, working drafts of material that we will work up for publication at a later date. In some cases, the text is obviously already in journal format and we expect to submit the work soon. In other cases, large gaps exist that reflect our need to collect more data or to further analyze those we have. We have written these chapters for different audiences. They differ in style and, perplexingly, even in the name we use for the bird. (One journal requires us to call the bird, the Cape Sable Seaside-Sparrow - note capitals and hyphen- a requirement that we do not adopt elsewhere.) The different audiences mean that papers repeat some material. Moreover, they require different levels of numerical precision. For example, a value of 46% might appear as "about half" in another chapter. The reader should also understand that, by request, we produce this report in late summer and not at the end of the calendar year. This gives interested parties in Florida and elsewhere a chance to appreciate and digest our conclusions well before management decisions need to be made the following year. This constraint also means that we must complete these chapters within less than 8 weeks of ending our field season. When chapters are marked "draft" we mean just that. We solicit and appreciate comments. Please remember that as our knowledge increases we sometimes change our opinion of the relative importance of the factors that affect the sparrow. This year's report replaces previous ones. Where it conflicts with previous reports, this is the one that should be taken as our latest word. For example: in our 1994 report, we thought that Hurricane Andrew may have caused the precipitous decline in the sparrow's numbers west of Shark River Slough. We now think that this storm was, at worst, only a minor contributor.