Volunteers monitor endangered piping plover chicks released on Lake County beach; ‘They were right at home’

Walking a northern Lake County beach shoreline Saturday, Glen Moss of Libertyville heard an endangered piping plover chick utter a cry.

“I looked up, and there was a bald eagle overhead,” he said.

Three piping plover chicks took off to the sky. A few moments later, Moss heard a “peep.” One of the chicks landed three feet in front of him. Two other plovers also returned.

“The plovers are safe,” he said.

Those chicks — and another hatched at a captive-rearing facility in Michigan — have been running around on the sand between Illinois Beach State Park and Waukegan Beach in Lake County for a few weeks, and roughly 20 local volunteers like Moss have been closely watching the young shorebirds to keep them safe until they fly south for the winter.

As of Monday, after a thunderstorm Saturday night, all four chicks were seen alive, healthy and running around Waukegan Beach.

Volunteers just learned that three of those chicks, now about 40 days old, are related to the piping plover that nested in Waukegan and at Montrose Beach in Chicago, and came to be known as Monty. He’s their uncle, and perished in 2022 after raising three broods in Chicago. Three other captive-reared chicks were released at Montrose Beach in Chicago and are also being monitored by volunteers.

“The Lake County volunteers are in real-time connection and report to each other where and when they’ve seen the birds,” said Diane Rosenberg, a Riverwoods resident who helped form Sharing Our Shore-Waukegan in 2019, a partnership between the city of Waukegan and Lake County Audubon Society.

The group educates the public about the piping plovers and the rare dunes ecosystem. The partnership includes a monitoring program through which volunteers walk the beaches to protect piping plovers if they land there or attempt to nest.

Recovery program

The chicks serve as an important milestone to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Piping Plover recovery program.

“This is the first time captive-reared (piping plover) chicks have been released outside of Michigan,” said Brad Semel, endangered species recovery specialist for the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.

He traveled to the University of Michigan Biological Station to retrieve seven chicks. Piping plover eggs were collected from failed nests in New York State and transported to the Michigan captive rearing site, where they hatched and grew.

Semel drove seven hours, listening to their peeps in the back of his vehicle. Every so often, he fed them meal worms and crickets. He released four of them on July 12 near a shallow swale at Illinois Beach State Park.

“The chicks immediately went down to the water, and bathed and washed off their travel dust,” Semel said. “They were right at home.”

The Lake County chicks have been named after native dune plants: Marram (marram grass), Blaze (blazing star), Pepper (pepper plant) and Sunny (Western sunflower).

Monitors can contact beach managers and local police in case a situation arises, like someone letting a dog run loose on the beach, which can incur a $500 fine. Moss said one monitor saw a boat landing at the beach near the plovers, and a dog was in the boat. The monitor explained the situation, and the boaters returned to the water.

Approximately 500 to 800 piping plover pairs once nested annually throughout the Great Lakes, but by the 1980s that number had declined to about a dozen pairs, resulting in the species being put on the federally endangered list.

Captive rearing programs, monitoring and habitat restoration have helped the species, but there’s more work to be done. The sandy beaches in Lake County once supported the largest nesting populations of plovers in the state until the Industrial Revolution leveled their habitat, according to Semel.

Work of citizens and officials to clean up sites and monitor piping plovers shows, “the resilience of nature,” he said. “I think people are recognizing the ecological value of the lakeshore.”

After 30 years of not nesting in Lake County, piping plovers nested there again in 2009, 2015 and 2018. Not all nests are successful, requiring collecting of eggs or young to transport them to another place with good habitat. This summer, 80 pairs of piping plovers nested in the Great Lakes region.

Chick behavior

Semel said monitors are documenting for the first time how piping plover chicks that have been raised in captivity adapt to their new outdoor homes. Typically, the young watch adult behavior when predators arrive, for example. Other captive reared birds in the past have only been released in Michigan, and there were no monitors there to watch them.

Monitors in Lake County are learning the young plovers have some innate abilities to recognize a potential predator. When a kestrel, a type of hawk, flew over at the Lake County site, the plovers “flattened themselves in the sand and blended right into the beach,” Semel said.

Matt Tobin, a Deerfield resident who leads the Lake County monitoring program for Sharing Our Shore, said at his last walk, it took a half-hour before he saw the chicks.

“At first, all I saw were just a lot of gulls and a couple of Canada geese,” he recalled. “Finally, I saw two of the plovers. They flew across a little inlet area, and then two more joined them, and all four were there. You can see the bands on them to identify them.”

Tobin observed one behavior, called foot trembling, where the plover stops, extends out a foot and then taps the sand. “It’s likely to create vibrations to bring up some insects,” Tobin said. “Since they had no adults to learn from, this behavior could be innate.”

The ‘Monty and Rose’ connection

Sharing Our Shore-Waukegan was formed after a piping plover pair, known as Monty and Rose, nested in the gravel parking lot at the municipal beach in Waukegan in 2018.

“Unfortunately, that gravel parking lot had a lot of traffic and there was no program or public outreach to let people know about the endangered piping plovers,” Rosenberg said.

State biologists salvaged the eggs before they hatched. Monty and Rose returned to the region the following year and successfully nested at Montrose Harbor for three years, where they became superstars, received their names and won the hearts of Chicago-area volunteer monitors.

“The arrival of Monty and Rose first to Waukegan has changed that community,” Semel said. “The Sharing Our Shore program has touched hundreds of children … and the city administration is now cognizant of the importance of the dunes and the natural area for more than just a swimming beach.

“The city now hires beach rangers, not only to pick up trash, but to make certain there is actually a community connection among locals and the beach,” he said.

In 2020, an outbreak of botulism in Wisconsin where plovers were nesting led authorities to take four chicks, restore them to health and release them at Illinois Beach State Park. Sharing Our Shore monitors were there to help.

“Because of the monitors, we knew how long they were here and that they regained strength from their bout with botulism,” Semel said. “The chicks successfully overwintered in Florida. It was what we call an assisted migration.”

Semel has told the Lake County monitors that piping plover chicks raised in captivity have a 70% chance of returning to the site where they were released.

“We’ll be looking for them to come back next year,” Moss said.