The first time Andrea Jones, director of bird conservation at Audubon California, noticed western snowy plovers, she almost did not see them at all. Walking along the higher tide line of a Central California seaside around 2007, she came across what appeared to be a bunch of grey rocks a couple hundred toes off. The “stones” abruptly stood up, exposing feathered white bellies as they scampered away. The capacity to vanish in plain sight is this muffin-dimension, grey-backed shorebird’s major defense from predators these types of as hawks and owls. “Sometimes you can not see them till you’re virtually on best of them,” Jones claims.
When the species’ coastal populace blends in beautifully amongst the sparsely vegetated dunes and seashores they inhabit together the Pacific Coast, from Washington State to Baja California, their desire for beachfront genuine estate with few vegetation has contributed to their undoing. Invasive plants this sort of as European beach front grass have ruined and crowded the birds’ habitat, as has increasing growth, which amplifies other natural dangers, far too. In unique, ravens, voracious indigenous predators of plover eggs, have exploded in numbers for the reason that they can change urban foodstuff waste into a smorgasbord and concrete properties into cozy nests.
In the 1980s, these threats slashed the U.S. populace of coastal western snowy plovers from an approximated 2,300 to significantly less than 1,500, major to its 1993 listing as threatened less than the Endangered Species Act. (As if that weren’t sufficient, climate adjust-pushed sea-stage rise is projected to shrink lots of of the beaches they use even even further.)
Considering that then, hundreds of experts, land managers and volunteers from extra than 25 companies have labored to increase the birds’ quantities, making it possible for the American population to rebound to about 2,300 older people as of 2023. The coastal inhabitants should maintain continuous at 3,000 breeding older people for a 10 years before it can be upgraded from its threatened status. Due to the fact progress has slowed in current a long time, scientists are increasing attempts to raise the range of chicks that endure each individual calendar year and very carefully monitoring the population’s development.
As a portion of the recovery hard work, Matt Lau, a biologist at Issue Reyes Nationwide Seashore, just north of San Francisco, scours the dunes every single summer season all through breeding period for snowy plover nests. To avoid ravens from poaching eggs, he encases the nests in wire cages with holes large sufficient for plover mothers and fathers to freely occur and go, and sets up a wider perimeter all-around favored nesting locations applying a knee-higher cable to retain individuals absent. If he occasions it ideal, he can be near by to attach shade-coded bands to the ankles of recently hatched, marshmallow-measurement fluff balls, to monitor the birds during their life. Elsewhere in the park, team are restoring dunes by removing invasive vegetation, permitting the plovers to reclaim the sand for breeding. Equivalent efforts are underway up and down the coastline.
“It’s a ton of perform,” suggests Jones, who will work on western snowy plover recovery with Audubon. “But we put snowy plovers in this circumstance, and it’s our responsibility to take care of it.”
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