Protecting the Shore's tiny, feathered visitors

All in a day's work for Assateague's 'Plover Crew'

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It's just before 7 a.m. on a late May morning at Assateague Island National Seashore. The northernmost portion of the beach is deserted, with the exception of a small group of people huddled around tripod-mounted spotting scopes.

"Back in that shell area?" one woman asks, never taking her eyes off her scope.

"No, to the right of the horse poop — unless that's just the way the sand looks," another replies.

With their backs to the ocean, the watchers appear to be scanning the sand — which is exactly what they're doing.

The group of people, members of Assateague's "Plover Crew," are looking for the island's first piping plover chicks of the season. The small, tan and white birds, with just a few black markings, are nearly impossible to spot when they're sitting on a nest.

"I love it," says park ranger Tami Pearl. "It's like a puzzle. Every year we try to figure out where these birds are going to nest."

Pearl, who's been studying the endangered species at Assateague for a decade, is the ranger who heads the plover crew which, aside from her, is made up entirely of seasonal employees. Each year she's responsible for training the group to help monitor the birds during their annual visit, which usually lasts from March to September.

National Park Service rangers monitor endangered piping plovers at Assateague Island. video by Laura Emmons

Federal requirements

Pearl and her associates don't just monitor the plovers because they want to. The national park is required to do so.

According to Jack Kumer, natural resource specialist at Assateague, Congress listed piping plovers as a species that was threatened with extinction in the 1980s. "The federal government gets to pick and choose what plants and animals are at the risk of being lost," he explains.

Because plovers are endangered, the national seashore is required to send staff out each spring to find out where the birds are nesting. Those areas are then protected so the birds' eggs have a chance to hatch.

"It's not just protecting the nests from the public, it's protecting them from park staff as well," Kumer says. "The only people who can go in are the people who are trained to go safely."

Since the area of Assateague preferred by the plovers is the north end, where just a thin expanse of sand separates the bay from the ocean, that portion of the national seashore is closed to the public. Some plovers, however, do nest in the heavily trafficked OSV portion of the beach. When that happens, staff are forced to close off the area so people don't disturb the birds.

"We're only closing the areas where it's absolutely necessary," he says. "When the birds leave, we open the area back up to the public."

Kumer said closures at Assateague are less frequent than they are at some other beaches, where there isn't a dedicated staff to oversee the nesting process. At those places, it's not uncommon for officials to simply close the beach altogether — rather than just a portion of it — for the entire summer.

He admits the park's charge of protecting a national resource and providing for public recreation can get tricky.

"We have to have the public out here, but we have to protect the birds," he says. "It's a tight juggling act."

Protecting the plovers

For Pearl, plover duty begins as early as March, when male birds begin staking out territories on the beach. She starts keeping an eye on them to see who will set up where, because once the males have picked an area of beach they like, they'll make shallow depressions — called scrapes — in the sand to attract mates.

Once the female has laid three or four eggs in the scrape, she and the male begin taking turns sitting on the nest. That's when Pearl and her crew get busy.

Once they've identified a nest with eggs in it, they put up an exclosure — an enclosure built of wire and posts to protect the eggs. Nests not protected are liable to get stepped on by the park's wild horses, or humans, or eaten by predators.

Pearl has the exclosure building process down to a science. Because the targeted nests are occupied, she and her team walk quickly in a single file line to the nest. As they approach, the bird sitting on the eggs typically scurries off to a safe distance.­

When she and her crew reach the nest, they roll out a length of wire, pound wooden posts into the ground to anchor it in place, then dig a trench to bury the bottom of the wire, stabilizing the structure. They finish by covering the exclosure with mesh and sweeping the area surrounding the exclosure flat.

"We want to make sure the bird can still access the nest, "Pearl says, pointing out as long as sand around the exclosure is smoothed out, the gauge of the structure's wire is large enough that the birds can fit through it and return to their nest.

In all, it takes no more than 12 minutes. Once Pearl and the crew have retreated to their truck, they take out their scopes and watch to make sure both parents return to the nest. While they usually do, there are times when they are too upset. When that happens, staff members take down the exclosure.­

"If we don't install the exclosures, we have a pretty high failure rate," Pearl says, adding predators like gulls and foxes frequent the area.

Once the nests are protected, they're marked on Pearl's master list. At least once week, she uses her scope to check the nests and ensure they're still occupied.

"Little cotton balls"

Piping plover eggs typically hatch 30 days after the parents begin sitting on them. When Pearl's master list of the island's array of nests shows one has reached the 30-day mark, she and her crew head out to check the nest.

If a look through binoculars reveals an empty nest, they investigate.

Pearl walks around the edge of the exclosure, looking for clues. She wants to make sure there are no crab holes or predator tracks nearby, indicating the newly hatched precocial — meaning they're born with feathers and ready to move around — chicks might have died shortly after hatching.

If no negative signs are found, Pearl and her assistants get out their binoculars and scopes and begin the sometimes tedious process of scanning the sand and sparse beach grass for a brood of plovers.

On this particular day, an excited "I see them!" comes from one searcher, who points the others in the right direction, describing the area by whatever landmark is available, whether it's a pile of horse manure or a white shell or dark patch of sand.

"They're like little cotton balls," Pearl says upon catching sight of the four not even day-old chicks.

Once the brood has been located, Pearl records the pertinent data, such as when and where the chicks were located — the beach's "overwash fan" — and what they were doing — foraging. The birds will be monitored until they leave Assateague in the fall.

A struggle to survive

Pearl says the work her group is doing at ­Assateague is critical as habitat for the plovers diminishes.­­

"Plovers are struggling to survive outside of protected areas," she says.

While there are beaches up and down the coast, most of those — like Ocean City's — are groomed. Beaches that are cleaned nightly are too disruptive to the birds. There's also not a lot of room for foraging in busy beach towns.

"They like the wild island interior to do their foraging," Pearl says as she begins to pack up her scopes for the day, just before noon.

After spending the morning checking the island's nests, searching for any new broods and putting up exclosures, Pearl and her team typically spend the last few hours of the afternoon cleaning up their gear and doing paperwork so they can be back at it at 6:30 a.m. the following day.

While the prospect of spending the summer looking for sand-colored birds on a sandy beach might seem tedious to some, it's what Pearl looks forward to each day.

"My dream job was to work in the field with an endangered species," she says. "It's pretty rare these days to come into a job like that."

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