PELLSTON, Michigan-Sarah Foote prepares a meal of black worms and tiny crickets for the endangered piping plovers she's helping to rear-white, fluffy birds constantly on the move.
Feeding time comes every three hours from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. for the smallest chicks at the Piping Plover Captive Rearing Center and it takes a team to do it. Foote, animal program manager at Potter Park Zoo in Lansing, has visited the University of Michigan Biological Station for 15 summers as part of the team effort to rejuvenate the Great Lakes shorebird population after near extinction in the 1980s.
This summer, they counted a record 88 unique nesting pairs-more than halfway to the goal of 150 pairs. The shores of the Great Lakes were once home to nearly 800 pairs of piping plovers. In 1990, that number had dropped to between 12 and 17, only in the state of Michigan on two of the Great Lakes.
"It's great to be part of a conservation story that's a Michigan conservation story," Foote said. "I am just helping these birds that would've never made it in the wild. This is a very special species."
Protecting piping plovers also conserves other species they interact and live with, said Aimée Classen, director of the U-M Biological Station and professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.
"Piping plovers are an important conservation effort," she said. "We're seeing declines and biodiversity globally and this program helps to slow that loss. Eighty-eight breeding pairs is a signatory of the success that we've had."
The piping plover is the highest profile endangered species in the Great Lakes region, and that protection extends to its nesting grounds along the shores. Francie Cuthbert, professor emerita at the University of Minnesota and a University of Michigan alumna, said that without the plovers, the shorelines would be more commercialized and developed.
"Anyone who has spent time in the Great Lakes knows how spectacular many of the beaches are, and there are many wild beaches still left and people like to go there to recreate, to camp, hike, whatever. And those sites are, to a large extent, being protected because of the presence of piping plovers, because of their legal status," she said.
Known for their whistling call, adult plovers weigh an average of 1.7 ounces (or about a half stick of butter) with a 15-inch wingspan. They have white and sand-colored feathers with a black band around the neck and another on the forehead, orange legs and an orange beak tipped in black.
They nest on beaches that are also popular with people and their dogs, which can disturb nesting birds. Predators such as merlins and ravens also take a toll. About 40% of plovers nest at Sleeping Bear Dunes mainland and North Manitou Island.
"Piping plovers nest on the shoreline and they are very traditional. They are using sites that they used a hundred years ago. So they look for a signature on the landscape of wide firm beaches, sand covered with smaller cobble, a certain distance from the tree line, often near a small stream that's entering into the lake," said Cuthbert, who started the intensive plover recovery, captive rearing and rerelease program more than 30 years ago at the field station in Pellston.
Since the program began, the team has increased the number of nesting pairs and the places where they nest. At the beginning, they were found only in Michigan on two of the Great Lakes, and now they have recolonized sites in Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and Ontario, Canada, Cuthbert said.
The Piping Plover Captive Rearing Center is managed by the Detroit Zoological Society in collaboration with the University of Minnesota and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The facility along Douglas Lake in northern Michigan is staffed every spring and summer by avian specialists stationed at the U-M Biological Station to incubate and hatch out abandoned Great Lakes piping plover eggs and care for chicks to reduce extinction risk for this federally endangered species.
"Raising young birds is a lot of work and there has been success," Cuthbert said. "But recovering the population is very slow. There are lots of threats and reasons that keep the population from exponentially growing."
Dangers in the wild
Every spring, piping plovers make their annual migration north from their southern wintering grounds for the upcoming breeding season. Cuthbert said 25% to 30% of the piping plovers that are raised in captivity at the Bio Station and released into the wild survive to return to the Great Lakes to mate after wintering. Cuthbert's team has released more than 400 birds over the years.
Piping plovers make shallow nests on flat, open, sandy beaches-the same beaches that attract people, their pets and development.
Up to 28% of nests are abandoned each season, most often following the death of a parent plover that was taken by a predator or when high water washes out a nest. Primary predators include coyotes, skunks, gulls, crows and birds of prey.
The effort to save the tiny birds involves coordinating dozens of scientists and volunteers across six states and Ontario, two tribes and multiple government agencies, who all help monitor and track piping plovers.
Field monitors observe nesting. When something happens to one parent, the other parent can't incubate eggs on their own and leaves the nest. The eggs are then collected under federal permits and brought to the station where they are incubated, hatched and reared until they can survive independently.
Rearing the plovers
Zookeepers from across the U.S. work in two-week rotations at the U-M Biological Station to provide artificial incubation and raise chicks in a lakeside building and protected pens along the Douglas Lake shoreline until the birds are able to fly and ready to be set free in the wild and released along the Great Lakes.
The Detroit Zoo has managed the rearing center's operation for 24 years, enhancing and growing what Cuthbert and graduate students built from scratch. The zoo, because of its expertise in bird care and incubation, has developed protocols to incubate abandoned eggs and then care for the chicks that hatch, until they are ready to be released back into the wild. Piping plovers can fly when they're 25-35 days old.
The field station in Pellston features a flight pen outside the plover building and training grounds along the beach with a pen surrounded by netting to allow the growing plovers a safe space to stretch their wings and explore the sand. They also forage for fly larvae and little insects on the shore, as well as get exposed to the elements like wind and rain.
Banding and flight
Before they're released, each chick's legs are outfitted with a unique combination of color bands so they can be permanently tracked.
Stephanie Schubel, lead plover bander and field team coordinator for the Great Lakes population recovery effort, is one of four University of Minnesota researchers stationed at the Bio Station. She is also a University of Michigan alumna.
The unique banding combination on the bird legs is critical for identifying individuals on the breeding grounds and also for volunteers and birders who follow the plovers' travels down to the coasts of South Carolina, Georgia, Florida and the Gulf states.
"It's really important when we learn of those wintering sites that we make sure there's some sort of protection going on," Schubel said. "Because plovers spend nine months of the year there, and then they're here only about three months."
Protecting birds and more
After the record year, piping plover researchers are optimistic about the future of both the species and the Great Lakes ecosystems.
"I think they're very beautiful birds. The young are irresistible-so cute. But it's really the Great Lakes shoreline that I find to be so spectacular and unusual globally," Cuthbert said. "We need to protect it. The plovers are essentially a symbol of the Great Lakes shoreline and where you find them you find other rare species. As long as they're being protected, the sites where they nest are also protected."
And that benefits the people who live around and visit the Great Lakes. They are able to use and enjoy the natural environment in the coastal shore region without development or land uses that are unhealthy for the ecosystem, she said.
Classen said while a 30% success rate of the human-reared plovers returning to mate and nest in their home grounds doesn't sound that impressive, it's about the same rate if they were fledgling in the wild.
"That's outstanding. Most conservation efforts just don't have success rates like that. We're really unique," she said.
And the more people see piping plovers on the shorelines of their family vacations, it draws their attention to the environment around them.
"I feel like the piping plovers are a gateway for curiosity. You start with something that feels compelling and lovely and exciting and cute, and then it sort of opens up this whole world of the environment to students, to people who live in the area, to probably even the zookeepers who come here," Classen said. "And that opens up the whole world of ecology and evolutionary biology, which is really what we're about.
