After Four Decades, Efforts to Save Great Lakes Piping Plovers Are Seeing Signs of Major Success

It’s a balmy July afternoon on Cathead Bay, at the pinky tip of Michigan’s mitten. But instead of swimsuits, the 11 people gathered on the beach are clad in biologist-casual: hiking pants, floppy hats, binoculars aplenty. They’ve formed a large arc bending toward the water. Between them and the vastness of Lake Michigan, three fuzzy chicks zigzag across the sand. An order crackles over walkie-talkies and the semicircle begins to tighten.

Twenty yards. The young Piping Plover siblings grow more frenzied. Ten. Their parents scurry nervously nearby. Five. Two people carefully drop custom-sewn cloth traps over one chick and then another. The last plover sees an opening and races to escape. Quick as anything, field crew leader Stephanie Schubel gently scoops it up by hand. She’s been doing this for 17 years. It shows.

Contrary to what must be running through the shorebirds’ 15-day-old brains, their captors mean them no harm. Quite the opposite: The scientists are here to gather vital information they hope will help save the fragile Great Lakes population of Piping Plovers. Kneeling in the sun-warmed sand, they weigh the chicks, attach bands to their tiny ankles, and swab their mouths to collect DNA samples. One bird plops a slick globule on Schubel’s hand. “Oh, I got poop!” she says, genuinely pleased—more DNA, more data.

Within a few minutes the team will free the chicks to rejoin their parents, but they’ll keep a close eye on this and every other Piping Plover family on the Great Lakes. From April, when the first plovers arrive, until July or August, when they depart for the southern beaches where they overwinter, professional and volunteer monitors will do all they can to keep the birds safe. Great Lakes Piping Plovers need this devoted caregiving because market hunting, waterfront development, and other forces nearly wiped them out in the 20th century. The birds were never very abundant here, probably totaling a peak of 500 to 800 pairs. By 1990, four years after the population was listed as endangered, the birds had become alarmingly scarce: Along the 4,500-mile Great Lakes coast, a mere 12 pairs had maintained a foothold. All of them were in Michigan.

Since then, a broad coalition of conservation partners—biologists and zookeepers, tribes and government agencies, nonprofits and universities—has brought about a striking rebound. “When you add it up, it’s hundreds of people working really hard to try to save this one little bird,” says Vince Cavalieri, a National Park Service biologist who oversees plovers at Michigan’s Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, the population’s core stronghold, about 40 miles south of Cathead Bay. Last year the Piping Plover population reached a high of 81 pairs: 76 spread across five states, plus 5 in Ontario, on all five Great Lakes. Not only have the resilient shorebirds returned to remote coasts, they have also started families on human-built beaches and in the shadows of skyscrapers.

Even so, a tough road lies ahead. To delist the species, the U.S. population will need to nearly double, to a minimum of 150 breeding pairs, maintained for five consecutive years. Meanwhile, the plover partnership is caught in a frustrating game of Whac-a-Mole with an evolving cast of predators, and now uncertainty looms about whether federal funding critical to recovery efforts will continue. “The species is doing a heck of a lot better than it was even just a few years ago,” says Tom Prestby, Wisconsin conservation manager for Audubon Great Lakes. “But there’s still a long way to go.”

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any people have carried forward the work of saving Great Lakes Piping Plovers, but it all started with Francie Cuthbert. When she began researching the birds in the 1980s, not everyone agreed there even were Great Lakes Piping Plovers. Some scientists thought plovers nesting in the region were strays from two recognized populations—one along the Atlantic Coast and another on the Great Plains. Through the grapevine at the University of Minnesota, where she had recently joined the faculty, Cuthbert heard that a prominent shorebird biologist was telling colleagues she was wasting her time.

Cuthbert and her graduate students have long since proven the naysayers wrong. Since 1993 they have banded every plover they’ve found—more than 4,060 adults and chicks in total. Each individual gets an orange plastic band to signify that it came from the Great Lakes, along with a unique combination of bands of other colors to make the bird identifiable from a distance. No orange-labeled birds have been reported on the Great Plains, and monitors have spotted only four nesting along the Atlantic Coast. On the flip side, there are just two records of Great Plains–banded plovers—and none from the Atlantic population—breeding in the Great Lakes. “As soon as we started banding, it was obvious,” she says. “It was very clear that it was a distinct population.”

The banding program has become “the most powerful thing that we’ve done to understand the Great Lakes population,” says Cuthbert, who retired from teaching in 2022 but still heads up research for the recovery effort. It’s also a hell of a lot of work. Schubel and her crew call themselves the Plover Truckers for their pinball travels between nesting sites each breeding season—intense bursts of banding followed by long hours on the road, along with short flights or boat rides to reach island birds. Despite the close quarters and grueling schedule, Audubon quantitative scientist Sarah Saunders, who previously led the effort and still joins the crew on occasion, says her days as a Plover Trucker were probably the best of her youth.

Banding has enabled Cuthbert and her colleagues to count plovers, track their year-to-year survival, keep tabs on where individuals nest and overwinter, and create detailed family trees. It has also helped them document astonishing feats. One bird flew from Sleeping Bear Dunes to the Miami area—something like 1,400 miles—in less than 48 hours. Another, known as Gabby for her green, blue, and yellow (GBY) leg bands, is, at 16, the longest-lived Piping Plover on the Great Lakes and a prodigious breeder, having hatched some 35 chicks. Saunders, who was Cuthbert’s graduate student a decade ago, says a great deal of plover research, including her own studies on how to improve reproductive success, would’ve been impossible without Cuthbert’s decision to start banding the birds. “She could see the long-term play,” Saunders says. (In 2021 Frontier Airlines honored Cuthbert by naming one of its planes “Francie the Piping Plover.”)

If Cuthbert’s banding brainchild proved key to understanding the Great Lakes population, another of her ideas has been essential for growing it. All too often a plover egg is orphaned when a predator picks off its parents or a jumbo wave washes it down the beach. Each loss is meaningful for such a tiny population, says Cavalieri: “You never know who’s going to be the next Gabby.” Based on previous research she had done on Killdeer, Cuthbert suspected that if the recovery team gathered up those abandoned eggs, they might be able to hatch them in captivity and return the birds to the wild. Once again, she was right. The captive-rearing program she launched in 1990 at the University of Michigan Biological Station in Pellston has fledged around 400 plovers that otherwise would have been lost.

Inside the captive-rearing facility, which is not much more than a shed, caretakers are constantly working to give rescued birds their best shot at survival. A trio of day-old plovers, which can already walk and feed themselves, share a repurposed tortoise enclosure with stuffed animals and a mirror. Seeing their reflection or snuggling up with a plush buddy helps the chicks feel more secure, says Bonnie Van Dam, curator of birds at the Detroit Zoological Society, who has overseen the captive-rearing effort since 2001. In lieu of a parent, chicks brood under feather dusters. Speakers play a hushed soundtrack of Great Lakes waves to attune the young birds to their future habitat. At night, their minders turn on lamps to mimic moonlight.

The caretakers come from zoos in the Great Lakes region and as far away as San Diego and Orlando, Florida. During shifts that can last up to two weeks, they’re with the birds from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. Between six daily feedings, regular weigh-ins, frequent rotations of incubating eggs, and staying in touch with Van Dam for updates and troubleshooting, the work never stops. “Zookeepers are very passionate about their jobs,” she says. “They’re very good at multitasking and making do.”

As if to prove themselves worthy of such devoted care, young plovers evince a mighty will to live. The keepers use Elmer’s glue to carefully patch eggs that arrive cracked or dented, and for the most part the chicks turn out just fine. Vickie Igleski, who hails from Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo, points to a healthy pair of nearly two-week-old chicks that were found as eggs tumbling in the surf. “You guys are miracle babies,” she tells them.

Through some combination of their own tenacity and the zookeepers’ resourcefulness, more than 90 percent of the eggs that arrive at the facility survive to fledge, compared to a coin toss among wild plovers. The youngsters test their wings in an outdoor pen on the shore of a small lake at the biological station. Then, when they’re about a month old, they’re released into the wild on Great Lakes beaches. That’s when the real peril begins.

Afew hours before the banding crew arrives at Cathead Bay, Cavalieri trudges up a dune at Sleeping Bear Dunes, trailed by Schubel, Igleski, and a few others and carrying three plovers in a plastic crate. They’ve come to release these captive-reared birds into their ideal habitat. After descending to the beach along Lake Michigan, Cavalieri and Schubel kneel beside the crate and gently lift its top. Out flutter the fledglings. They make short, exuberant flights, their first in the wild, and scatter across the lakeshore. One plover wheels high over the dunes and then settles in the zone where sand merges with surf-smoothed cobbles. Its plumage perfectly matches the backdrop, and for a moment the bird has vanished. Then it scuttles across the beach and takes wing.

With dunes jutting hundreds of feet above the aquamarine lake and the Manitou Islands beckoning a few miles offshore, it’s a breathtaking landscape. Because it is part of the national park system and mostly undeveloped, it’s also among the safest places to release the birds. Even in this plover paradise, however, danger lurks everywhere. A few years ago on North Manitou Island, a sandy wilderness that supports nearly a quarter of all Great Lakes Piping Plovers, a single family of coyotes wiped out some 20 chicks. It was a devastating loss for the vulnerable population.

For the past several years, death has more often come from above. When Cuthbert began her plover work, Merlins were a rare sight; like other falcons, they had been hit hard by the insecticide DDT. In the 1990s, though, Merlin populations experienced a significant rebound. “Now they literally are at every plover nesting site in the Great Lakes,” she says. “They are a magnificent killing beast.”

Today the recovery team works with Wildlife Services, a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, to kill the raptors at some nesting areas, and it is investigating nonlethal methods for managing them. Nobody wants to destroy one bird to save another—Cavalieri credits a Merlin encounter with setting him on a bird-focused career path—but it is necessary. In 2018 Saunders led a study showing that without some lethal management, Merlins alone could upend the plover rebound.

Now there’s a new menace. In 2024 Saunders, Prestby, and federal scientists published a paper providing the first evidence of Common Grackles feasting on Piping Plover eggs. Many nests are surrounded by cages meant to deter predators, but these exclosures were designed for larger animals, like foxes, gulls, crows, and raccoons. Grackles waltz right through them. “I don’t know how we deal with that,” Cuthbert says. Doing so may require removing trees near nests to prevent grackles from gathering, the paper’s authors suggest, modifying the cages, or even abandoning the protective structures altogether—despite the obvious risks—so they don’t serve as billboards for an easy meal.

Fortunately, the plovers don’t face these threats alone. Around the Great Lakes, volunteer and professional monitors are the heart of the recovery program. They identify nest sites, erect protective fencing, rescue abandoned eggs, and educate members of the public—their spotting scopes tend to draw curious beachgoers—about the importance of keeping dogs on-leash and giving the birds space to raise their young. “Every year I’m blown away by how much affection and love they have for these birds,” says Tamima Itani, the lead volunteer coordinator in Chicago. “The monitors do everything they can to protect the plovers and their nests.”

Great Lakes plovers are most vulnerable while nesting, but the danger doesn’t stop when they fly south. On their wintering grounds, which stretch from Texas to the Carolinas and the Caribbean, the Great Lakes birds mix with Piping Plovers from the Atlantic and Plains populations and concentrate in coastal inlets that provide ideal foraging and roosting areas. Because such areas are also popular with tourists and dog walkers, bird advocates have ramped up educational programs on these beaches, too. “We use them for recreation, and they use them for survival,” says Lindsay Addison, a coastal biologist at Audubon North Carolina. Inlets also are often mined for sand, which is hauled away to renourish naturally shifting shorelines, she says. To help protect these sites, Addison and her colleagues survey inlets to gather data on how plovers use them, information that shapes permitting decisions by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and other regulators.

Accelerating climate change poses other threats to beaches at both ends of the plovers’ range. In the South, rising seas are eroding roosting sites, which in turn fuels demand for sand mining elsewhere. “King tides were never really something I dealt with earlier in my career,” says Melissa Chaplin, the South Carolina–based recovery team lead for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) field office. And while the Great Lakes are nontidal, shifting precipitation patterns and declining ice cover have produced increasingly dramatic swings in annual lake levels. In some years high water submerges the wide beaches plovers need, leaving them with only marginal areas for nesting.

There’s encouraging evidence, though, that restoring habitat can help Piping Plovers thrive even in places that were once degraded. As soon as state and federal partners removed invasive plants and rehabbed a beach in Michigan’s Wilderness State Park in 2016, a pair of plovers nested at a site that had been abandoned for nearly a decade. In Wisconsin, plovers almost immediately took to new habitat after the Army Corps rebuilt islands in Lower Green Bay. They returned the next breeding season and nested there for the first time in 75 years. It was a major milestone for the state and the recovery effort, says Audubon’s Prestby, who coordinates plover monitoring at the site with the FWS and discovered the landmark nest.

Restoring coastal habitat is expensive work, and on the Great Lakes—churning with waves that can top 20 feet and edged with ice shelves that pummel the shoreline in winter—one major storm can quickly erase progress. But when it works, restoration benefits many more birds than just Piping Plovers, Prestby says. “They get all the news headlines and the grant money to help them out, but actions that help them are going to help a lot of other species.”

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ow, four decades into recovery efforts, Great Lakes Piping Plovers are halfway to the goal of 150 U.S. pairs. The road map for getting there is relatively straightforward, Cavalieri says: “The best conservation strategy is still protecting the places we’ve got as best we can, and trying to get as many chicks fledged as we can, and just build the numbers up to a point where they can absorb predation a little bit better.”

The people working toward that target have proven they’ve got the gumption and grit to reach it. What’s less certain is whether they’ll have the resources. The Trump administration’s crackdown on government spending and mass firings of federal workers, for instance, have caused delays in purchasing materials and hiring seasonal employees at Sleeping Bear Dunes, which left the plover team understaffed as the birds began returning this spring.

On top of that, conservationists are anxious about the future of a vital funding source for plover conservation across the region: the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI), a bipartisan program that has spent some $5 billion to clean up and protect the world’s largest freshwater ecosystem. Since 2010 the initiative has paid for banding, monitoring, captive rearing, research, and habitat restoration. The recovery team cannot sustain their work without the GLRI, Cuthbert says.

The Department of Government Efficiency, a unit under Elon Musk’s direction, has announced staff cuts at the EPA, raising questions about the agency’s ability to effectively administer the GLRI. What’s more, during President Trump’s first term, he proposed three consecutive budgets that called for slashing Great Lakes funding, though the cuts failed to make it through Congress. The president’s more recent and aggressive efforts to gut government programs have heightened concerns that this time he could succeed.

Plover conservation represents only a tiny slice of the initiative, which has supported some 8,000 projects to clean up pollution and manage invasive species, among much else, yielding $3 in economic benefits for every dollar invested. Though uncertainty and unease are the vibes du jour, Cuthbert and others remain hopeful that Congress will continue to invest in the GLRI. The region’s voters feel a profound connection to the lakes, and their elected officials know it. A bipartisan bill introduced earlier this year would reauthorize and increase the initiative’s funding, which expires in 2026, for five years.

For her part, Cuthbert certainly has no intention of letting up. Arriving at the biological station one day last summer to check on the chicks in captivity, she moves slowly but with purpose, despite having just had surgery on both hips. She plans to do what it takes to keep showing up each season right on time, along with the plovers. “I’m interested in staying on as long as I can,” Cuthbert says. “Every morning I wake up and I’m excited to check my texts.” 

There’s been plenty of cause for excitement, and one of the most encouraging signs yet has come in the past two years. Historically the team has released captive birds only in Michigan at established strongholds like Sleeping Bear Dunes. But in 2023 the recovery team decided for the first time to set birds free in other Great Lakes states. For one thing, having so many plovers clustered together makes the population vulnerable; one storm or disease outbreak could spell disaster. Plus, data show that captive birds are especially likely to return to their release site. Faced with a bumper crop of 39 captive chicks and a delisting goal of establishing 50 nesting pairs outside of Michigan, they chose to roll the dice.

The gamble paid off. Twelve of the 18 birds turned loose in Wisconsin, Illinois, and New York returned the following spring, and six of those nested where they’d been released. One of the sites was on Montrose Beach, a bustling patch of public lakefront in Chicago that had become a showcase for the bird’s rebound. In 2019 Itani, the site’s volunteer coordinator, found a pair of Piping Plovers beginning to nest in the city for the first time in seven decades. In a nod to the birds’ new home, she named them Monty and Rose. Itani and her fellow monitors worked with the public to give the birds space, and the duo became media darlings, lovable symbols of recovery and resilience.

Rose didn’t return in 2022, and Monty died that spring from a fungal infection. That’s the way it goes with the Great Lakes Piping Plover rebound: Like climbing the sand dunes at Sleeping Bear, it’s often two steps forward, one step back. In 2024, though, one of their offspring, a male called Imani, wooed a female named Sea Rocket—one of the three ­captive-reared birds released in Chicago the year before. The pair hatched four chicks on Montrose Beach. Within days three of them had died of unknown causes, but one young bird, known as Nagamo, survived.

As Audubon went to press, Nagamo’s whereabouts were unknown, but other birds were returning to nest. A plover arrived in Ontario on April 4, the earliest spring return on record. Among the birds observed by monitors at Sleeping Bear Dunes was Gabby, grande dame of the Great Lakes plovers, who promptly laid her latest clutch of eggs. In the Windy City, three males had touched down, including Imani, the last descendant of Monty and Rose. Then, on Mother’s Day weekend, Sea Rocket appeared and looked ready to couple with Imani once more. Her return to Chicago was a powerful shot of hope in a two-ounce package, a testament to the sort of toughness Midwesterners prize. “If they can raise plovers at Montrose Beach,” Cuthbert says, “they can survive anywhere.”

This story originally ran in the Summer 2025 issue as “Small but Mighty.” To receive our print magazine, become a member by making a donation today.