‘A little bit of joy’: can tiny rafts save endangered sparrows from rising seas?

In Rhode Island, a small team of researchers and volunteers is fighting, against the odds, to save saltmarsh sparrows from extinction as their chicks drown in ever higher tides

Photographs by Jason Jaacks

Knee-deep in water, the young man lifts his arms. His wrists are grabbed, next his ankles, then he feels himself flying through the air, nearly horizontal, before plunging into New England's pungent tidal waters.

Grinning and still dripping, he receives a homemade certificate documenting his induction into the Needle in a Haystack Society.