{"id":33352,"date":"2025-07-30T03:27:16","date_gmt":"2025-07-30T03:27:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/33352\/"},"modified":"2025-07-30T03:27:16","modified_gmt":"2025-07-30T03:27:16","slug":"a-record-year-for-great-lakes-piping-plovers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/33352\/","title":{"rendered":"A record year for Great Lakes piping plovers"},"content":{"rendered":"

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 U.S. 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis year, we\u2019re doing great. We actually just hit another record pair count. So, we have 85 nesting pairs this year. And that\u2019s four more pairs than we had the last two years,\u201d said Stephanie Schubel at the University of Michigan Biological Station near Pellston. She\u2019s been visiting sites across the region, checking on nesting sites as part of the Great Lakes Piping Plovers<\/a> conservation effort.<\/p>\n

Predators take a toll on piping plovers<\/p>\n

People involved in the effort to bring back the Great Lakes piping plover population are pleased with this year\u2019s success, but they\u2019re also concerned about the challenges to the nesting birds.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"AA piping plover chick explores a Great Lakes beach. Photo: Lester Graham \/ Michigan Public<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve lost at least eight to ten adults this year to merlins,\u201d Schubel said.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Saving the piping plover chicks<\/p>\n

When predators strike, monitors at each nesting site try to recover the eggs to send to the Piping Plover Captive Rearing Center at the University of of Michigan Biological Station.<\/p>\n

Francesca Cuthbert, a professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota\u2019s Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology said originally the Captive Rearing Center was \u201cjust a homegrown operation\u201d until the early 1990s. The Detroit Zoological Society got involved in the effort, building a hatchery at the University of of Michigan Biological Station and offering expertise. The Detroit Zoo also involved other zoos in the effort through the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.<\/p>\n

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\nFrancie Cuthbert looks in on piping plover chicks at the Captive Rearing Center at the University of Michigan Biological Station. Photos: Steve Jessmore; Lester Graham \/ Michigan Public<\/p>\n

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\u00a0profile that would be published in the Audubon magazine<\/a>. (Jessmore has won multiple national awards from Audubon for his bird photography.)<\/p>\n

The three of us visited the hatchery. Eggs were being incubated. Newly hatched chicks were already escaping containment in an incubator.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of these guys just bailed out,\u201d Cuthbert said to a staff member. \u201cAnd now he\u2019s just skitting around and probably not very happy with life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Apparently, that\u2019s 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, Mich. into a larger enclosure.<\/p>\n

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 biological station. From there, they\u2019ll be taken back to the original beach where their nest was.<\/p>\n

Cuthbert said the chicks go from egg to beach in 30 days.<\/p>\n

\u2018Tremendous\u2019 habitat potential at Lake Superior<\/p>\n

One of the nesting sites is at Whitefish Point, Mich. on a section managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service\u2019s 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\u00a0song by Canadian musician Gordon Lightfoot<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

There was concern, though, that losing habitat might stop the birds from nesting there. Cuthbert noted even with that loss there\u2019s a \u201ctremendous amount of potential habitat there.\u201d<\/p>\n

She\u2019s not alone in that thinking.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe lakeshore has always been dynamic, right?\u201d said Max Henschell, director of research of Michigan Audubon, which operates a bird observatory in co-operation with the Seney National Wildlife Refuge.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat point has come and gone throughout the history of the point. So, these birds are used to that dynamic too,\u201d Henschell said.<\/p>\n

Too many males, not enough females<\/p>\n

This year, there is one nesting pair, four chicks exploring their new world and two extra males. That\u2019s causing a little conflict.<\/p>\n

Stephanie Owens has been monitoring the nesting site at Whitefish Point. We watched as the female chased away one of the males.<\/p>\n

Like all the piping plover nesting sites, there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\"\"Chicks from orphaned eggs are kept safe from predators at the Piping Plover Captive Rearing Center at the University of Michigan Biological Station. Photo: Lester Graham \/ Michigan Public<\/p>\n

The piping plover\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo, it\u2019s very, very darling. It\u2019s pebbles and sometimes it\u2019s even shells, like even zebra mussel shells,\u201d explained Stephanie Schubel.<\/p>\n

She said the last couple of years there have been extra males on all of the beaches where piping plovers have been nesting.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t know really where we\u2019re losing the females,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

It could be when they\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe just know that we have less females, which means not as many pairs as we could have if it was a balanced number,\u201d Schubel said.<\/p>\n

People and dogs don\u2019t mix with piping plovers<\/p>\n

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\u2019s hats.<\/p>\n

Francie Cuthbert said in the 1950s there was another significant drop in the population because of museums.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a lot of collecting (for specimens) that went on not only of adults, but young, eggs and so on,\u201d Cuthbert said.<\/p>\n

She\u2019s looked at the records of museums across the country and there are Great Lakes piping plovers in many of them.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo, that was a pressure that came down on them.\u201d<\/p>\n

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

\u201cIt was before a time when people didn\u2019t even know what the word biodiversity meant. And these were beaches that people thought, \u2018well, there\u2019s nothing here; it\u2019s just sand,\u2019 \u201d Cuthbert said.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople and plovers don\u2019t mix,\u201d Cuthbert added.<\/p>\n

At Whitefish Point, a lot of people were strolling the beaches, many of them unaware of the tiny chicks venturing to the water\u2019s edge in search of food. They eat invertebrates in the wet sand.<\/p>\n

Nearby, a woman was throwing a toy into the lake for her dog to fetch.<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone thinks \u2018my dog is not going to do anything,\u2019 but they\u2019re still a dog,\u201d Stephanie Schubel said, adding, \u201cThey like to run and chase stuff and this can really stress the birds.\u201d<\/p>\n

She said keeping your dog on a leash \u201cis super helpful.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Scattered across Great Lakes shores in Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Ontario, Great Lakes piping plovers are nesting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":33353,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[49,48,295,66],"class_list":["post-33352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-environment","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33352"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33352\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}