When California Audubon Bird Conservation Director Andrea Jones first saw a snowy plover, she could hardly see it at all. Around 2007, she was walking along the high tide line on a central California beach when she spotted what appeared to be a bunch of gray rocks a few hundred feet away. The “stones” suddenly stood up and ran away, exposing their white, feathered bellies. The muffin-sized gray shorebird's ability to disappear out of sight is its primary defense against predators such as hawks and owls. “Sometimes you don’t see them until you’re almost at the top,” Jones says.
Coastal populations of this species are perfectly integrated into the sparsely vegetated dunes and beaches they inhabit along the Pacific coast from Washington state to Baja California, but their preference for less vegetated seaside real estate is This contributes to the destruction of its habitat. Invasive plants such as European beachgrass are destroying and crowding bird habitat, as is expanding development, and amplifying other natural hazards. In particular, crows, a voracious native predator of plover eggs, are exploding in numbers as they can turn urban food waste into smorgasbords and concrete buildings into cozy nests. is increasing.
In the 1980s, these threats caused the U.S. coastal western snowy plover population to plummet from an estimated 2,300 to fewer than 1,500 individuals, and it was listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act in 1993. (As if that wasn't enough, many of the beaches they use are predicted to shrink further due to rising sea levels due to climate change.)
Since then, hundreds of scientists, land managers, and volunteers from more than 25 organizations have worked to increase the bird population, restoring the U.S. adult population to about 2,300 birds as of 2023. The coastal population should stabilize at 3,000 adult birds during the breeding season. It takes 10 years to upgrade from threatened status. As growth has slowed in recent years, researchers are scaling up efforts to increase the number of chicks that survive each year and closely tracking population trends.
As part of recovery efforts, Matt Rau, a biologist at Point Reyes National Seashore just north of San Francisco, scours the dunes every summer for snow-covered plover nests during breeding season. To prevent crows from poaching the eggs, he surrounded the nest with a wire mesh cage with holes large enough for the mother plovers to move freely, and used knee-high cables to surround the nest site to prevent people from getting close to it. Set up a wide perimeter. If your timing is right, you can be nearby and track the bird's life by attaching a color-coded band to the ankle of a newly hatched marshmallow-sized fluff ball. Elsewhere in the park, staff are removing invasive plants and restoring dunes so plovers can retrieve sand for breeding. Similar efforts are underway across the coast.
“It's a lot of work,” said Jones, who is working with Audubon to recover the western plover. “But we put the snowy plover in this situation, and it's our responsibility to fix it.”