Ohio Birds and Biodiversity

Nature: Piping plover's nest offers hope for shorebirds return

Piping plovers are tiny, charismatic shorebirds. While closely related to the familiar killdeer, they are much smaller, weighing half as much as their burlier relative.

Beaches and piping plovers are inseparable. Piping plovers nest on beaches, winter on beaches, and rest and feed on beaches in migration. They even look like beach, with their upperparts colored like dry sand. A dark ring bisects the pale breast, and the legs and bill are orange-yellow.

Historically, piping plovers were common on beaches along the Atlantic seaboard from the Florida Keys north to the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes. John James Audubon wrote this about them in the 1830’s:

“Their notes, which are so soft and mellow as to nearly resemble those of the sweetest songster in the forest, reach your ear long before you have espied the piping plover. …these sounds come from perhaps twenty different directions, and you are perplexed, as well as delighted.”

The first Ohio piping plover nest was found on June 26, 1903 at Cedar Point in Lucas County near Toledo, which is now part of Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge (this is NOT the amusement park site). William Dawson and James Hines, the discoverers, photographed the nest and published the details in Dawson’s book The Birds of Ohio, published that same year.

Over the next two decades, breeding plovers were found in five other Lake Erie counties: Ashtabula, Erie, Lake, Lorain, and Ottawa. At their peak in the mid 1920’s, an estimated 30 pairs of piping plovers bred along Ohio’s portion of Lake Erie. But the majority nested around Cedar Point.

By the mid 1930’s the population was waning. The last Ohio nesting record was of two pairs in 1942, at Cedar Point. As the decades went by, few ornithologists were optimistic that piping plovers would return to nest.

The bigger picture of Great Lakes piping plovers also became grim. By 1990, the population throughout the five lakes had dropped to about 13 pairs, this from a historical high of perhaps 800 pairs.

While periodic high water levels played a role in adversely affecting beach habitat, a much bigger factor is people. In 1903, when Dawson and Hines first found nesting plovers in Ohio, the state’s population was about 4 million people. Today, we are closing in on 12 million. The human population has grown similarly throughout much of the Great Lakes, and increased beach-going has displaced many piping plovers.

In 1986, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service listed piping plover as endangered, and the ensuing efforts to protect the species have borne fruit. The Great Lakes population has rebounded to around 70 pairs.

Thus, it was great news when local birder Warren Leow located a pair of piping plovers at Maumee Bay State Park in late May. He involved expert birder Paul Jacyk, who realized that the birds were commencing nesting activity. Jacyk notified the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and Ohio Division of Wildlife, and efforts to safeguard the birds were soon afoot.

I visited Ohio’s celebrity piping plovers on June 10. The birds chose not to nest on the Lake Erie beach, but selected a sheltered artificial beach on a manmade lake just 300 feet inland from Lake Erie. This site is only two miles west of the former Cedar Point breeding epicenter.

The plover nest is surrounded by a large wire enclosure, which is standard protective protocol. The cage prevents predation of the eggs by gulls and other predators. Both plover parents were born in similar cages and are unfazed by the contraption. They easily slip through the mesh and come and go at will. The wildlife agencies also taped off a large section of beach, forbidding entry. Had they not, the nest wouldn’t have had a chance given the site’s popularity with beach-goers.

Nellie, the female, was born last year in Presque Isle, Pennsylvania. Nish, the male, was also born in 2020, but along Lake Michigan near Chicago. Both take turns with incubation duties.

The first egg was laid on May 31, and a few days later the clutch was complete with four eggs. They should have hatched by the time you read this, and the precocial chicks can walk within a few hours. Hopefully they will flourish, and become the first successful Ohio piping plover brood in over 80 years.

In addition to the wildlife agencies, much credit goes to the local Black Swamp Bird Observatory for organizing an army of volunteers to nest-watch. I met volunteers Julie Heitz and Jack Burris on site, and they and their counterparts ensure that the birds remain undisturbed. Jack has been there almost every day since the nest was found, often from 6 am to 10 pm. Without Jack, Julie and the others’ vigilance, the probability of a successful nesting would plummet.

A collective 100 grams of piping plovers has caused an outsized stir in the Ohio birding community. They send a message of hope, and recovery. Here’s to Nish and Nellie.

Naturalist Jim McCormac writes a column for The Dispatch on the first, third and fifth Sundays of the month. He also writes about nature at www.jimmccormac.blogspot.com.

 

A typical scene at the "sand spit" at Conneaut Harbor, Ohio. Conneaut is wedged into the extreme northeastern corner of Ohio, on the shore of Lake Erie. It is a legendary birding locale, and in this photo birders mingle with legions of typically much more intrusive users of the harbor. John Pogacnik and I had led this trip to Conneaut last fall, and we saw lots of interesting birds. But both birds and birders must dodge numerous cars and other vehicles on the sands, wind-surfers soaring over the waters, bird-chasing dogs roaring about, and a host of other people-related disturbances.

In spite of its activity, the sheltered sandy flats in the Conneaut Harbor manage to serve as refugia for migrant shorebirds. Many of these sandpipers and plovers are making long-distance hauls from the highest regions of the Arctic tundra, where they breed, to places as distant as South America. Small birds that engage in annual journeys that span great distances need places to stop, rest, and refuel, and Conneaut provides such a way station. At least intermittently, as the birds are frequently disturbed by the seemingly ever-present people and their attendant hijinks.

I recently posted about two Piping Plovers that spent a few days in mid-July at Lorain, Ohio. That post is RIGHT HERE. Well, Dave Slager made the effort to run down the band information and received the following information from Alice Van Zoeren, a researcher at the University of Minnnesota. All or nearly all Piping Plovers that breed along the Great Lakes are prominently marked with combinations of colored bands that can be used to identify the individual. Thanks to Dave for posting this information to the Ohio Birds listserv:

*Bird 1 (the bird with no leg flag, an orange band, and a light green band)*


"I can't be as specific for this report since the band combination is one
used for chicks. We reuse these combinations in subsequent years. Breeding
adults, like the other plover you reported, are given unique combinations of
colors that individually identify them for life. This plover was hatched in
07, 09 or 10 at Gulliver, MI in the upper peninsula or possibly (though
probably not as likely) at Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, WI in 2006."

*Bird 2 (the bird with 2 yellow color bands, an orange band, and an orange

leg flag)*

"Thanks for your reports of two Great Lakes Piping Plovers. This male plover
was hatched in 2007 near Escanaba, MI and banded in 2009 at Port Inland, MI
along US-2 in the Upper Peninsula."

The Great Lakes population of Piping Plover is imperiled, to say the least. Listed as federally endangered, this charismatic species had plummeted to about 12 breeding pairs by 1983. Protection of their beach nesting habitats has allowed for some growth in the population, and current estimates place the number of pairs at less than 70. There may have been as many as 700 breeding pairs along the Great Lakes prior to European settlement. Some of them bred on Ohio's Lake Erie beaches, but the last nesting dates to 1942. We only get the occasional migrant now, such as these birds in Dane's photos.


You may have noticed that these birds' legs are heavily ornamented with bands. The colors and combinations indicate where they originated, and when. I suspect that someone is running down this information, and if I learn the back story on these pipers, I'll pass it along.

Anyway, in perhaps the world's first blog post to combine Piping Plovers and royal catchfly, we switch gears and jump into Bigelow Cemetery, a remnant of the once vast Darby Plains tallgrass prairie. Bigelow is a state nature preserve not far west of Columbus, Ohio, and is a must-see for anyone interested in prairies.

I was there recently, and the star of the prairie show, royal catchfly, Silene regia, was nearing peak bloom. This is a big plant; its magnificent spikes can shoot up four feet or more.

If you are interested in planting native species, especially in the context of a prairie garden, royal catchfly is a must-have. Several vendors, most notably the Ohio Prairie Nursery, had them for sale at last weekend's Midwest Native Plant Conference and sold lots. By the way, that conference went smashingly and was a ball, and I'll be sharing some photos from the event later.

The brilliant red flowers are star-shaped and sport a long corolla tube. Not surprisingly, they never fail to attract Ruby-throated Hummingbirds.

Here's why royal catchfly - and many of its brethren in the genus Silene - has the "catch fly" in its name. In this tight shot of the upper stem, we see gnatlike bugs and even a few beetles that became ensnared by the plant's viscous glanduar hairs, got stuck, and perished. Press a calyx - the tubular lower portion of the flower - between your fingers sometime. You'll instantly notice the Elmer's Glue-like quality of the plant.

This sort of thing interests me. It stands to reason that these sticky hairs that arm the upper portions of the plant are a defense against insects making their way up the plant from the ground. The plant is, in essence, trying to select for airborn pollinators such as the aforementioned hummingbirds, as those pollinators are probably a more efficient way to disperse pollen. But, when hairs such as these on the catchfly evolve to such a stickiness that they kill insects, is this a step towards evolving carnivory? In fact, I wonder if anyone has looked at royal catchfly to see if the plant already is capable of assimilating proteins and other useful goodies from the bugs that die on its stems.

Not all small insects perish on the gluey catchfly stems. I noticed that many of the plants had small colonies of of tiny blackish lentil-shaped aphids, which seemed to be able to move around with ease and are presumably completely specialized to feed on royal catchfly. All of these aphid colonies were tended by ants -two of them can be seen in this photo - and they also had no problem negotiating the sticky stems. Ants often associate with aphids, feeding on nutritious "honeydew" secreted by the tiny insects. In return, the brutish and warlike ants guard the helpless aphids against predators.