A second chance

Rose and Monty’s story is one of strong resilience and persistence. Only six and a half days after suffering a blow at the paws of an opportunistic skunk, they have established a new nest and Rose has laid an egg.  

First egg laid in second nest of 2021 season. Photo credit: Brad Semel (IDNR)

The exclosure on the first nest abided by USFWS specifications for Piping Plover exclosures. It had withstood a fox perching on it, families of raccoons and skunks trying to outsmart it, coyotes challenging it, and numerous other visitors such as rabbits and mallards. It was placed over the nest such that the nest was perfectly centered in it.  But on an ill-fated night, a wire junction weld failed, allowing a skunk to reach further into the exclosure than the 2x2-in openings would otherwise allow.  The skunk saw a nutritious egg meal and went for it, unaware of the endangered status of the Piping Plovers and the scores of hearts that would be broken. This event allowed us to witness firsthand just one of the many challenges that face this pair and all the remaining pairs of Great Lakes Piping Plovers. Without our continued care and involvement even fewer would survive 

Monty and Rose’s breeding instincts kicked in immediately. Within hours, on that next morning, they started scraping and courting again.  For the past few days, they have scraped cups in the sand in the new habitat addition, on the dunes across from the pier, and in the protected beach area.  They (or should we say “Rose?”) made up their minds and selected a lovely spot high on the protected beach, smattered with bright white shells.  They made a scrape there, decorated it with shells and courted and mated by it, resulting in a new nest. A wonderful team of individuals from the USFWS, IDNR, USDA and Chicago Park District moved into action to install an exclosure and surveillance cameras.  It took just about 10 minutes for the exclosure, the 2 camera posts and the cameras to be installed. Now that’s teamwork!  The new exclosure is much bigger and made of stronger gauge wire and welds. Thank you to Brad Semel for so carefully and lovingly building it. 

A multi-agency team heading to nesting location to install exclosure and surveillance camera. Photo credit: Tamima Itani

And many thanks as always to the Chicago Park District for their visionary natural areas program that made this possible, to the Montrose Beach Dunes steward and volunteers who have nurtured the habitat that is now home for the piping plovers, to all the monitors watching over the plovers and nest from sunrise to sunset and to the supporters who have given Monty and Rose wide berth on the beach and are and cheering them on.