Saving a Species Is It Worth the Cost?

It’s a drab little bird — a brown sparrow, not even five inches long, that you wouldn’t give a second glance if it happened to hop across your path.

The Florida grasshopper sparrow might be the one of the most endangered species in the continental United States. Biologists are working hard to save it — and they think they’re making progress.

But their efforts raise a persistent question: Why go to the trouble? It’s just a sparrow, after all. Sparrows are everywhere. Don’t we have enough of them as it is? And why should we care if a nondescript little bird — one that most of us will never see — slips out of existence? In this entry of Voices of the Valley Floor-a & Fauna we invite guest ornithologist to discuss the value of species including our threatened Gunnison's prairie dog.