Make Way for Plovers

The recovery of the piping plovers is a good news story in what feels at times like a growing sea of environmental disasters around the world. Placed on the list of threatened species about twenty years ago, these tiny shorebirds that make their nests in bare scrapes of sand on remote, windswept barrier beaches, have made a strong comeback in recent years and are now nesting in large numbers on the Cape and Islands.

All against extremely high odds, since plovers have many enemies that pose a threat to their existence. There are natural enemies in the form of skunks, raccoons and marauding seagulls. And there are man-made enemies in the form of the tires of four-wheel-drive vehicles. It’s easy to drive over a plover nest: the birds are no bigger than the palm of your hand and colored like the sand, their eggs speckled like sea stones, a built-in genetic protection against predators.

Plovers are also migratory; they nest in one place and then fly south for the winter, quite improbably covering thousands of miles in their annual journeys between winter and summer homes. Recently shorebird biologists in Canada began to track them through the use of colored leg bands. As a result, we know that one plover that wintered in the Caribbean has come to Aquinnah to make its nest.

Twenty years ago on the Vineyard the plovers were at the center of controversy over beach closures to four-wheel-drive vehicles during nesting season. But today fishermen and picnickers have learned how to share the beaches, respecting closures when they are in effect. And that too is good news.

But here is the cautionary news: biologists say that even though the plovers have recovered nicely, because so little remote beach space remains they will probably never come off the list of threatened or endangered species.

And that means it is more important than ever to make way for plovers.