Captive-raised snowy plovers are making history by guarding their eggs in two separate nests in Waukegan and Chicago.
Three plover eggs were recorded in Waukegan on Saturday, and additional eggs were spotted at Montrose Beach, 30 miles downstream from the Lake Michigan shore.
“This is a historic milestone for the Great Lakes Tufted Plover Project,” said Brad Semel, endangered species recovery specialist for the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.
Three of the four future parents — Blaze, Pepper and Sea Rocket — were hatched last summer at a captive facility in Michigan. The three were released near Montrose Beach and Illinois Beach State Park in Zion last July and are starting their families after returning from their wintering grounds further south.
The fourth plover is Imani, born in the wild on Montrose Beach to Monty and Rose, the famous plover pair that first captured Chicago’s attention in 2019.
Semel said captive-raised plovers have never laid eggs in Illinois before, only in Michigan.
If all goes well, in another month the new parents will be doting on up to four hatchlings per nest, he said.
The three captive-raised plovers started out as eggs laid on a New York beach in spring 2023. One of the parents was killed by a hawk while incubating the eggs, so the eggs were moved to a facility in Michigan where they had a better chance of survival. About a month after they hatched, Semel picked up the eggs, put them in a cat carrier, drove them to Illinois, and released them.
“It’s been a long time since we’ve had plovers nesting in two locations along the Illinois lake shore,” Semel said.
Volunteer rangers at both sites are excited but cautious in their efforts to educate people about the need to protect rare birds and the coastal ecosystems they inhabit.
Chicago’s Piping Plover: How Monty and Rose’s “love story” unfolded at Montrose Beach
Carolyn Luke, a volunteer plover monitor with Lake County Audubon Society’s Sharing Our Shore-Waukegan program, has been visiting Blaze and Pepper almost daily since the birds returned in May, just a day apart, from two different wintering grounds.
“By Saturday, we had three eggs laid, and we were hoping for a fourth,” said Luke, who formerly lived in Lake Forest and Chicago, but now lives in Pleasant Prairie, Wis. If captive plovers can raise wild shorebirds, Luke said, “the great experiment” to save the endangered shorebirds would be successful.
“Blaze and Pepper are very hardworking,” Luke says. “They never take their eyes off the nest, protecting it from crows and other threats.”
Imani, a Great Lakes plover, incubates her eggs amid a newly installed protective cage at Montrose Beach in Chicago on May 31, 2024. The Chicago Parks Department announced new eggs have been found in a protected area of the Montrose Beach dunes. (John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune)
But recently, volunteer plover conservation watchers had to intervene after a crow, a type of blackbird that eats crops and garbage and destroys bird nests, got into the cage.
“Pepper was at the nest on Saturday and got up a few times to catch some bugs,” Luke said. “Blaze was out foraging for food for quite a while so she must have used a lot of energy laying the eggs.”
Snowy plovers usually lay four eggs, one every other day, then incubate the eggs until the young hatch at the same time about a month later.
At Montrose Beach, Tamima Itani, lead volunteer and interagency coordinator for the Chicago Piping Plumbers Monitor, said she was amazed that the sea rockets, who are just 11 months old, were able to return to the area where they were released, mate and lay eggs.
“I’m also pleased that Imani’s desire for companionship has been fulfilled after going two seasons without one,” Itani said.
Imani’s parents, Monty and Rose, attempted to nest in Waukegan in 2018, then successfully raised cubs in Montrose Beach in 2019, 2020 and 2021.
Monty died in Montrose in 2022 while waiting for Rose to return.
Although she never married, her son Imani returned to his hometown three years ago to look for a mate. When Sea Rocket arrived this spring, Imani courted and mated with her. Pepper is Monty’s great-nephew.
“As rangers we feel a great responsibility because so many people, organisations and partners are working to save this species from extinction,” Luke said.
With help from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, cages have been set up around nests in Waukegan and Chicago.
“The cages allow the plovers easy access to and from the nest but limit the intrusion of potential predators such as foxes and raccoons,” Semel said. “The key is whether the birds will accept the cages. After we set the cages up (in Waukegan), we quickly left the site to observe their behavior.”
Within a minute, the birds were back at the eggs, Semel said. “I was so relieved that they both accepted the cage,” she said.
Additionally, surveillance cameras have been installed in Montrose and Waukegan, allowing Semel and his team to monitor the plovers’ location and potential disturbances 24 hours a day.
An estimated 500 to 800 pairs of plovers once nested across the Great Lakes each year, but by the 1980s, numbers had fallen to around a dozen, resulting in the bird being placed on the federal endangered species list.
A Great Lakes plover, a sea rocket, forages near a nest where she laid eggs on Chicago’s Montrose Beach on May 31, 2024. The Chicago Parks Department announced new eggs have been found in a protected area of the Montrose Beach dunes. (John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune)
In 1876, Illinois ornithologist E.W. Nelson wrote that the American plover was “a very common summer resident along the lake shores of Illinois.” According to H. David Bohlen, author of “The Birds of Illinois,” Nelson noted that there were 30 breeding pairs within a two-mile stretch of Waukegan’s shoreline.
Nelson also noted that large numbers of plovers breed along the shores of Lake Michigan near Lake Calumet in the late 1800s.
Illinois’ population declined dramatically in the 1940s, Bohlen said, citing recreational and industrial development in the Zion, Waukegan and Calumet areas as reasons the plovers stopped returning to nest.
Over the past 40 years, breeding programs, monitoring and habitat restoration have helped conserve the species throughout the Great Lakes.
A record 80 breeding pairs of piping plovers were documented in the Great Lakes region last year, said Stephanie Cabal Schubel, a member of the Great Lakes Piping Plover Conservancy team.
“The efforts of residents and authorities to clean up the site and monitor the plover demonstrate the resilience of nature,” Semel said.
Luke said when he started watching plovers, he didn’t realize how important the shores of Lake Michigan were to a variety of migratory birds.
Luke says he has seen shorebirds such as turnips and sandpipers perch near the plovers’ nests in spring. “They’re very dependent on our coasts for food to get to their breeding grounds further north,” he says.
Montrose Beach is also a safe resting place for migratory birds, with about 12 acres set aside specifically for nesting plovers, according to Itani of Chicago Piping Plovers.
Itani, Luke and Semel say that in effect, the plovers have created a protected area on the Chicago and Waukegan coast that benefits many other animals and plants.
“It’s thanks to the plovers that people are now aware of the ecological value of the lakeshore,” Semel says.
