Julie Zickefoose: Piping Plovers on Cape Cod

My painting of a piping plover family, done on commission for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

In our day's walk on South Beach (we started in the morning, and got picked up around 2:30 in the afternoon) I was delighted to run across two nesting areas that had been cordoned off for piping plovers, those Federally threatened shorebirds with the temerity to lay their eggs right on the sand of beaches all along the East Coast from Maine to Virginia. How dare they, when there are off-road vehicles to be driven, dogs to be run, raccoons, weasels, opossums, skunks, foxes and feral cats to be fed, towels to be spread, fireworks to be viewed, and volleyball to be played? You get the picture. It's tough out there for piping plovers.

I worked with these little birds for three very intense seasons in Connecticut, in the late
80's. At the height of the program I was wrangling 30 volunteers and patrolling beaches in an 80-mile range of coastline. I looked skeletal and just about wrecked my hip joints, walking miles in soft sand while carrying loads of signposts and string. I got a reminder of that on our walk, as my poor old heels sank into wet sand--a week of severe sciatica to enjoy afterward. That was what was wrong with me--cultures revealed that the back pain that I thought might be a kidney infection turned out to have been brought on by the exertion. Good thing I never got the antibiotics I wanted. Better now, though my back revolts when I paddle my little peapod canoe. Tough. I'm going out anyway.

Back to plovers--I was unpleasantly surprised to find new downy chicks--perhaps only a week old--in the first week of August. Since the first broods hatch in April, they should have been flying long ago had everything gone well. I suspected, looking at the evidence of overwash in otherwise suitable nesting areas, that low-profile South Beach might be a marginal place to nest. I conferred with supercute bloggrrl DeeAnne, who keeps a lovely blog about her work studying birds, and spent time this summer on South Beach, keeping tabs on its nesting birds. Sure enough, there were several overwash events, and some of South Beach's plovers were on their fourth nesting attempt. Egad. If you could see a piping plover egg, how enormous it is in relation to the little hen's starling-sized body, and think about her having to lay maybe 14 eggs in a single season, you'd feel my pain.

So here were these tiny downy chicks running about like blown thistledown, with a stern corps of great black-backed gulls staring them down.

Between the waves, the wind, the water, the predators, the cruel and heedless morons who drive right through the posted nesting areas on off-road vehicles, and the trespasser who somehow managed to step on an about-to-hatch clutch of eggs inside the roped off area, I marveled that there are any piping plovers on this benighted planet at all.

And then I saw it--a recently-fledged piping plover, innocent of the black markings an adult would wear. Rare, and even rarer: that it wore no bands; had never been handled by a researcher. What a beautiful thing. I hoped hard that the downy chicks we saw made it to flying age, and were strong enough to migrate when the time came. Their parents hadn't given up.