Trouble is brewing for an endangered bird species. A rain-soaked spring has flooded large areas of North America’s Great Lakes region. As water levels rise, Lake Michigan has crept within a few yards of the nesting zone of the piping plover.
Piping plovers are migratory birds. They breed during summers in the northern United States and Canada and head south to winter in coastal areas from the Carolinas to Texas. Plovers spend lots of time on the ground—building nests, guarding eggs, searching for food such as insects, spiders, and crustaceans. Their brown-and-gray feathers provide camouflage.
As parts of the nation’s midsection flooded this year, the Great Lakes filled to the brim. For businesses and waterfront homeowners accustomed to lots of sand, that’s worrisome.
For plovers, it’s deadly.
Even if the birds aren’t flooded out, the rising waters make their lives difficult. Many birds move to places with trees and underbrush, where predators lurk. Some even flee to urban areas.
“High water levels really put them in danger more than most other species,” says Vince Cavalieri, piping plover coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Some nests on the Canadian side of the lakes have been swept away, he says.
Researchers at Sleeping Bear Dunes along Lake Michigan, home to nearly half of the Great Lakes plovers, are working to protect their native birds. They’ve roped off breeding grounds and posted keep-out signs. They’ve added cage-like enclosures that keep out predatory gulls, raccoons, foxes, coyotes, and unleashed dogs—the plovers’ biggest problem, according Erica Adams, a National Park Service plover specialist.
The next few weeks are crucial. Most of this year’s eggs will hatch by the end of June. If additional storms don’t wash away nests, a new batch of piping plover youngsters may survive.
Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? — Matthew 6:26
(A piping plover walks on the sand in Glen Haven, Michigan. Surging water levels are threatening the endangered birds. (AP Photo/John Flesher)
