piping plovers

I’m not one of these people that is trying to ever grow their [bird] life lists. Those are for those birders. If you’re not familiar with life lists – it’s the list created by a birder of all the birds he has ever seen. Sometimes its just mentally kept in someone’s head. I keep a casual list for my own recollection and history. Others keep a list for the sake of making a list - a list of ever expanding birds that can only be satisfied by traveling the world and making a checkmark next to each name. You know these people when you bird with them: after they see a bird they are already racing on to see the next bird. It’s not the bird they are satisfied with but the number.

I say this because I was able to add a notch to my life list this past month. And it was exciting! Earlier this month the bird club went out for a Piping Plover search. Often the bird club will go out in specific search for a certain bird. Many of those times we come up empty handed. So, when I read the email that we were looking for Piping Plovers - a species which I have never seen - that are federally protected, and which beach-goers would rather run over than protect, I was excited but had reservations. It was early April, and still cold in Southeast Massachusetts. The Piping Plover is a small bird. I did not really expect it to have arrived yet, and according to ebird.com it didn’t look like anything had arrived yet (that anyone posted). My only hope was that in years past these birds had arrived around the same dates on which we were searching.

When we got to the beach on West Island in the morning it was fairly empty – only a guy walking his dog in the far distance. It was sunny that day, but we had some snow flurries earlier in the week. We began to walk the beach toward the man and the dog. There didn’t seem to be any bird on the beach let alone a hard-to-see Piping Plover. My hopes were fading that not only wouldn’t we see a Piping Plover, but not much of anything else, either.

Well, that was until Mike, the bird club president, spotted a Piping Plover from across the bay. How he saw it is beyond me and the rest of the group that was there that day. All of a sudden though, the day was looking up. We all stopped next to the water and peered off into the distance to try to find it. Indeed it was a Piping Plover, or at least that was what Mike was telling us. We saw a bird flying back and forth, but even with binoculars it was still just a speck in the sky. Only Mike, an experienced birder, could tell at that distance it was definitely a Piping Plover. [How could he tell? From the way it was flying.]

We got our short glimpse. For me though, I had to have more. We began to walk slowly up the beach toward the bird. We had spotted three birds initially. A few minutes later we saw them fly away peeping as they went by. Our excitement was almost gone, except that only two flew away and not three. We continued to walk. Finally, we got to a reasonable distance were we could really see the birds. And boy, were they hared to see, almost exactly blending in with the sand. No wonder they are federally protected. Not only do the adults look like the sand they live on, but their eggs look like small rocks in the sand.

We got closer and closer until basically we couldn’t get any closer because they were so close. It was our lucky day. The Piping Plovers had probably just flown in during the night, and were exhausted. Although they would walk or fly away if you got too close, we were able to see the birds at a close distance that is usually unattainable. Not only that, but because they had just flown in, they weren’t going anywhere. We were able to watch them for as long as we wanted - real enjoyment for a birder.

Although we didn’t see a wide variety of birds that day, it was probably one of the best birding days I have ever had.

Here are some photos from the day: