Shoreline Restoration
Piping plovers are coming back from near extinction
By Becky Beyers
A quarter-century ago, the piping plover’s future appeared grim.
Only about a dozen pairs of the tiny Great Lakes shorebird remained in the mid-1980s, when it was listed as an endangered species. Today, thanks in large part to research conducted by Department of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Biology graduate students and professor Francie Cuthbert, the plover is slowly returning, with about 70 pairs now being tracked.
Cuthbert and her students work along the Great Lakes shores in summer, monitoring demographics and ecology and protecting the plovers’ nests from human and animal predators. Each plover is banded: chicks get a basic leg band, and adults wear a more complicated set of bands with detailed biographical and migratory information.
A newly hatched chick snuggles a feather duster foster parent in the Captive Rearing building.
Researchers also rescue abandoned eggs from the plovers’ nests.The chicks are reared by zoo technicians at the nearby University of Michigan Biological Station facility. In 2008, more than two dozen of the chicks survived and were released into the wild, and they’ll likely continue to migrate back to the Great Lakes each summer, Cuthbert says.