A record year for Great Lakes piping plovers

• After the population declined to as few as 12 nesting pairs in the mid-1980s, this year, researchers are monitoring seven times as many.
• The small shorebirds are still challenged by predators and people.
• A decades-long concerted effort by universities, zoos, and government agencies is helping Great Lakes piping plovers recover.

Scattered across Great Lakes shores in Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Ontario, Great Lakes piping plovers are nesting and reproducing this year. Since being put on the Endangered Species Act list in 1984, the plovers are recovering, but only with the protection and assistance of a significant coalition of people and organizations, ranging from universities, volunteer groups, Audubon Great Lakes, zoos, and state, federal, and provincial governmental agencies.

“This year, we’re doing great. We actually just hit another record pair count. So, we have 85 nesting pairs this year. And that’s four more pairs than we had the last two years,” said Stephanie Schubel at the University of Michigan Biological Station near Pellston. She’s been visiting sites across the region, checking on nesting sites as part of the Great Lakes Piping Plovers conservation effort.

Predators take a toll

People involved in the effort to bring back the Great Lakes piping plover population are pleased with this year’s success, but they’re also concerned about the challenges to the nesting birds.

Chief among those challenges is a small falcon called a merlin. It is a threatened species in Michigan. When more sightings of the bird began a few years ago, people were pleased. Then they found that merlins prey on piping plovers.

“We’ve lost at least eight to ten adults this year to merlins,” Schubel said.

Other predators that kill adult piping plovers, or chicks, or raid the nests for eggs include foxes, owls, racoons, skunks, mink, and weasels among others.

Saving the chicks

When predators strike, monitors at each nesting site try to recover the eggs to send to the Piping Plover Captive Rearing Center at the U of M Biological Station.

Francesca Cuthbert, a professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology said originally the Captive Rearing Center was “just a homegrown operation” until the early 1990s. The Detroit Zoological Society got involved in the effort, building a hatchery at the U of M Biological Station and offering expertise. The Detroit Zoo also involved other zoos in the effort through the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.

Cuthbert, whom everyone calls Francie, has been a leading figure in the Great Lakes piping plover effort. While I interviewed her, a photographer from Michigan, Steve Jessmore, was working on a profile that would be published in the Audubon magazine. (Jessmore has won multiple national awards from Audubon for his bird photography.)

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The three of us visited the hatchery. Eggs were being incubated. Newly hatched chicks were already escaping containment in an incubator.

“One of these guys just bailed out,” Cuthbert said to a staff member. “And now he’s just skitting around and probably not very happy with life.”

Apparently, that’s not unusual, because as soon as that chick was put back with the others, another hopped out, and Cuthbert could only laugh. Time to put the newly hatched chicks saved from a beach on North Manitou Island into a larger enclosure.

An audio recording of lakeshore waves and piping plover peeps help to create a natural environment. The birds will quickly be moved outdoors to a sandy beach on a lake at the U of M Biological Station. From there, they’ll be taken back to the original beach where their nest was.

Cuthbert said the chicks go from egg to beach in 30 days.

Whitefish Point

One of the nesting sites is at Whitefish Point on a section managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Seney National Wildlife Refuge. The site is just 15 miles from where the cargo ship the Edmund Fitzgerald sank with its crew, as made famous by a song by Canadian musician Gordon Lightfoot.

Whitefish Point once stretched its sand and pebble beach much farther out into Lake Superior. A winter storm destroyed two acres of the kind of habitat where piping plovers nest.

Whitefish Point is a popular tourist site because of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum and its iconic lighthouse. That makes it a good opportunity to tell more people about the plight of the piping plover.

There was concern, though, that losing habitat might stop the birds from nesting there. Cuthbert noted even with that loss there’s a “tremendous amount of potential habitat there.”

She’s not alone in that thinking.

“The lakeshore has always been dynamic, right?” said Max Henschell, Director of Research of Michigan Audubon, which operates a bird observatory in cooperation with the Seney National Wildlife Refuge.

“That point has come and gone throughout the history of the point. So, these birds are used to that dynamic too,” Henschell said.

Too many males; not enough females

This year, there is one nesting pair, four chicks exploring their new world and two extra males. That’s causing a little conflict.

Stephanie Owens has been monitoring the nesting site at Whitefish Point. We watched as the female chased away one of the males.

Like all the piping plover nesting sites, there’s a cordoned off area and then a cage over the nest. The openings in the cage are big enough for the birds to come in and out, but can help keep predators and people away from the nest.

The piping plover's nest is called a scrape. Basically, the birds use their bodies to make a small depression in the sand and then line them with pebbles.

“So, it’s very, very darling. It’s pebbles and sometimes it’s even shells, like even zebra mussel shells,” explained Stephanie Schubel.

She said the last couple of years there have been extra males on all of the beaches where piping plovers have been nesting.

“We don’t know really where we’re losing the females,” she said.

It could be when they’re young, or at their wintering grounds along the U.S. southern Atlantic coast, the Gulf of Mexico, or the Caribbean and Mexico. Or the females might not survive migration.

“We just know that we have less females, which means not as many pairs as we could have if it was a balanced number,” Schubel said.

People and dogs

The decline of the Great Lakes piping plovers is often blamed on market hunting in the 1800s. The birds were killed for their meat and for feathers for women’s hats.

Francie Cuthbert said in the 1950s there was another significant drop in the population because of museums.

“There was a lot of collecting (for specimens) that went on not only of adults, but young, eggs, and so on,” Cuthbert said.

She’s looked at the records of museums across the country and there are Great Lakes piping plovers in many of them.

“So, that was a pressure that came down on them.”

Another pressure is people. When beaches were selected for national, state, and local parks, they were often the places where piping plovers nested.

“It was before a time when people didn’t even know what the word “biodiversity” meant. And these were beaches that people thought, ‘well, there’s nothing here; it’s just sand,” Cuthbert said.

“People and plovers don’t mix,” Cuthbert added.

At Whitefish Point, a lot of people were strolling the beaches, many of them unaware of the tiny chicks venturing to the water’s edge in search of food. They eat invertebrates in the wet sand.

Nearby, a woman was throwing a toy into the lake for her dog to fetch.

“Everyone thinks ‘my dog is not going to do anything,’ but they’re still a dog,” Stephanie Schubel said, adding, “They like to run and chase stuff and this can really stress the birds.”

She said keeping your dog on a leash “is super helpful.”

While the record number of nesting pairs is being celebrated, the Great Lakes piping plover population needs to nearly double to be taken off the Endangered Species Act list. Population growth has been uneven.

While some of the challenges have been outlined above, other challenges include weather, climate, development along beaches, and potential mishaps such as a Great Lakes oil spill.