Piping Plovers Visit Lake Erie's Shores

July 11, 2014

The Piping Plover's melodious, “peep-lo" call gave this small, pale sandy-colored shorebird its scientific name—charadrius melodus. It's a sound that still gets birders excited for the chase when they hear it, especially since it's pretty rare in our region.

Plovers forage open beaches by skittering around quickly.  They stop abruptly and poke their beaks quickly into the sand to catch a dinner of crustaceans or insects. On the Great Lakes, the Plover relies on thousands of newly-emerged midge flies. The hungry chicks begin feeding independently within hours of hatching.
 
Piping Plovers that appear in Erie have nested in Michigan, but birders keep hoping a pair will set up housekeeping on Pennsylvania beaches like they once did.

Because of shoreline development, the Great Lakes Piping Plover population was listed as endangered in 1985.

Since then, an intensive conservation effort by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, universities and volunteers have improved the nesting success of the Great Lakes Piping Plover. They've gone from 17 nesting pairs when they were listed almost 30 years ago, to 70 today.

As the Piping Plover nesting season is underway across North America, if you are on the beach, be on the lookout for a squat little bird with a single black band on its neck and a short stubby orange and black bill. And if you are lucky, you will hear its melodious call.

Bird calls from The Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, recorded by George B. Reynard,  Warren Y. Brockelman, and Dolly Minis.