At times, the Piping Plover appears to be almost perfectly round. When it runs, its skinny, yellow-orange legs move so rapidly that it is like watching the pages of a flipbook come to life. During breeding season, adult males and females sport thick, black collars of feathers around their necks. These markings seem to suggest the tiny birds’ commitment to shackling themselves to their mates, their nests, and the shore for the entirety of the season’s reproductive cycle. Across their foreheads, the birds don a black band of feathers that stretch between their large and luminous eyes. This cluster of color asserts itself like an avian unibrow, a bold statement that immediately draws the eye to their stubby beaks and spherical features, two things that add to their irresistible charm. Juvenile plovers, more speckled and slightly lighter in color, often resemble rainbow moonstones as they run up and down the shore in search of food. Baby plover chicks scamper freely along the beach like dust bunnies perched atop stilts, returning to their parents to tuck themselves underneath their feathers for warmth, creating the illusion of a many legged, small-but-monstrous thing.

It has become nearly impossible for me to think of the Piping Plover without thinking of beach rocks. These stocky shorebirds are like stones come to life. The color of dusty beach sand with pure white underbellies that often resemble the smoothest of milky quartz stones, these birds who are only slightly bigger than your average House Sparrow, were almost entirely extinct along the shores of the Great Lakes 40 years ago. Today, with the help of conservationists, their population has increased to around 70 breeding pairs in the Great Lakes region, a drastic increase from the devastatingly low pair numbers of the 1980’s. However, just because their populations are slowly on the rise, the fight is far from over. Piping Plovers and their nesting sites are constantly in danger from human disturbance, predation, and the effects of climate change.

Often, when we think of fragile things, we think of manufactured materials that will easily shatter if they slip from our hands. We think of our mother’s fine china or our expensive, hand-held technologies. Often, we forget that an egg is fragile, too. We forget that animals, so easy to put out of our minds during the bustle of our day to day lives, can shatter into disrepair just like the most delicate pane of a stained-glass window. When the Piping Plover builds its nest, it is delicate. The males create shallow scrapes in the sand that get filled with smooth pebbles and discarded scraps of shells. The female lays her gray, be-speckled eggs amongst the hard stones and, together with her mate, they wait for them to hatch.

Great Lakes Piping Plovers Conservation Team has a story about a male plover who kept mistaking stones for eggs. While his mate sat on the real eggs, he would sit beside her, incubating stones. When the pair would switch off, he would add a stone to the group of eggs before sitting, continuing his attempts at hatching a chick from inside that solid, opaque sphere. We can laugh at this bird’s strange antics and chock it up to a brief blip of evolutionary confusion, but perhaps he understood something vital about the stones. When we think of a stone, we think of resilience. We think of their hardened bodies churning for centuries amongst the tidal waves, barely changing, only smoothing out, becoming more beautiful. If we counted stones like populations, their numbers would be plentiful. A piping plover lays its eggs amongst the beach stones, amongst all that hardened time. Of course, there’s the obvious reason of camouflage, the eggs mimicking the pebbles nearly perfectly. But let’s pretend for a moment that a stone is no different from an egg. That inside each, they contain the possibility of a lifetime. Once, a male plover saw no difference between the two. If we can do that too, hope and resilience start to blend into one.

For more information on Chicago’s local Great Lakes Piping Plovers, visit the Chicago Piping Plovers website.

Sources:

All About Birds: Piping Plover, Cornell Lab of Ornithology

Great Lakes Piping Plovers Conservation Team

National Audubon Society, Guide to North American Birds: Piping Plover by Ken Kaufman

Miyako Pleines is a Chicago area writer who shares her thoughts on birds and nature in monthly essays for Chicago Audubon.