Endangered piping plovers find new place to raise a family at restored Delaware beach

On a secluded beach along the Delaware Bay earlier this spring, two tiny shorebirds could be seen running side by side, sprinting up and down the beach along an invisible border.

Their skinny, little legs seemed to move a mile a minute as they did their parallel dance, a peaceful battle for territory between two male piping plovers during the spring mating season.

By this time of year, the sandy-colored shorebirds enter stealth mode as their best method of defense against predators that want to feast on their eggs. In a month or so, a tiny bird that looks more like cotton balls with toothpicks for legs will emerge ready to explore the beach and gobble up all the bugs it can find.

“They hatch out with the same size legs they’ll have as adults, like little teetering cotton balls,” said Audrey DeRose-Wilson, a biologist at the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control’s Division of Fish & Wildlife. “Like most plovers, when the chicks come out they’re like baby chickens — they’re fuzzy and immediately mobile and can forage for themselves. They are delightful little birds.”

Piping plovers have been protected as a federally threatened species since 1986, with their decline due primarily to beachfront development infringing on their natural beach breeding grounds and overhunting in the 19th century for the millinery trade. In Delaware, the species is considered endangered.

But for the first time in one Delaware beach’s history, the birds are finding that a newly restored stretch of sand may be the perfect place to raise a family.

As work was wrapping up on a $38 million restoration project at Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge in summer 2016, wildlife biologist Annie Larsen discovered the first piping plover nest at Fowler Beach. Unfortunately, it was not successful that year and no chicks survived a foraging fox, but it was the first known piping plover nest since the refuge was established in the early 1960s.

The following spring was a different story. Thanks to the widened and undeveloped beach at Fowler, the state recorded its best year for plovers, with 13 pairs successfully raising more than a dozen chicks. The previous high was 10 pairs in 2009, all of which were at Cape Henlopen State Park.

Most of those nests were at Fowler and produced 12 fledged chicks, meaning a dozen of the babies survived long enough to fly off on their own.

“We didn’t expect the biological response to be so rapid,” Larsen said. She said the Prime Hook staff expected it would take at least three to five years after the Prime Hook restoration project before they would see diverse wildlife bounce back.

“You just don’t take a system that took millennia to evolve, destroy it in years and then expect it to restore it in a couple years,” said Al Rizzo, project leader for federal refuges in Delaware, noting detrimental man-made changes to the ecosystem in the 1980s that ultimately led to problems addressed by the recent restoration project.

Also, the beach wasn’t designed for the plovers. The massive undertaking at Prime Hook aimed to restore marshes that had been drowned out by breaches in the dunes, and the sand used to expand Fowler was chosen with horseshoe crabs in mind.

But just as the plovers have benefited, so have the horseshoe crabs, fish and a slew of other migratory birds, such as the snowy owls and short-eared owls that drew dozens of birders to the beach this winter.

The state closed The Point at Cape Henlopen State Park on March 1, while the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service closed about half of the 3-mile-long Fowler Beach around the same time to give the vulnerable birds protection from humans, pets and predators. Those beaches will not reopen for public use until the fall, when the plovers head south to their wintering grounds.

So far this year, there are eight known nests filled with eggs — half of those nests are at Fowler and the other half are at The Point.

“There are so many perils in their life,” Larsen said, noting that foxes fed by neighboring communities are one of the biggest threats to an already vulnerable species. People bringing pets into these restricted areas also can do a lot of harm.

As for birders and photographers, Larsen warned that they should keep their distance. No matter how much they want a photo of a bird in flight — whether it’s a plover or a snowy owl or anything else — it is not worth the damage it can do by forcing the wild animals to expend energy they need to survive.

“You can literally harass a bird to death,” she said.

Larsen and DeRose-Wilson try to help the birds out by building protective fence enclosures around the nests once the eggs are laid, as well as the mandatory beach closures that require people and pets to stay away.

“Piping plovers and a lot of other shorebirds can only survive on a beach where natural processes are at work because they require wide, open, flat, sandy areas,” DeRose-Wilson said. “As we work to try to protect them and manage and create habitat where they can survive, we end up creating and sustaining some beaches in a more natural way.”

The tiny birds stand about 3-4 inches tall and adults weigh about 40 grams, making them a tiny target for a slew of predators. They are so small, and blend in so well with their sandy habitat, that it would be easy for people to accidentally step on them or run them over, which is why the beaches need to be closed to the public.

Once the birds pick their partners, they make shallow nests on the sand where they lay four eggs over the course of a few days. As the parents wait for their chicks to hatch, mom and dad take turns protecting and incubating the eggs. Once hatched, it takes about a month for the tiny, fluffy shorebirds to take flight.

“It’s just amazing, the partnership and the complete coordination between the male and the female to do all of these reproductive chores in such a short time,” Larsen said. “It’s just a miracle of nature.”

Contact reporter Maddy Lauria at (302) 345-0608, mlauria@delawareonline.com or on Twitter @MaddyinMilford.