Another plover summer comes to a close in Chicago
As Monty and Rose fly south for the winter
Even before the leaves lose their green and the nights cool and days shorten, there’s a sure sign another summer is coming to an end: the plovers have left the beach.
Monty and Rose, the Great Lakes piping plovers who three years ago became the first of the endangered shorebirds to nest successfully in Chicago in decades, have flown south after another Montrose Beach summer.
Monty touched down at his usual winter grounds in Texas earlier this month. His journey took, at most, 53 hours. Rose was recently spotted on the island off the Gulf Coast of Florida where she’s previously landed. Their two surviving chicks, named Imani and Siewka, will soon attempt their own 1,000-mile journey — if they haven’t already — with the potential to follow in their parents’ footsteps and help out a species once down to about a dozen nesting pairs.
The Montrose plovers’ surviving chicks are part of a strong year for Great Lakes piping plovers. There were 74 nesting pairs of plovers this summer, said Jillian Farkas, the Great Lakes piping plover recovery coordinator with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and 123 wild chicks fledged — the highest count since 2018. That exceeds the goal of 1.5 chicks fledged per plover pair and, including captivereared chicks, nearly two chicks fledged per pair.
The plovers at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore — a popular spot for the shorebirds — broke records with 81 chicks fledged along the northern Michigan coast.
“It takes a village to raise all these piping plovers,” Farkas said.
The promising numbers represent what can be
gained from coastal restoration — and a lot of human eyes keeping watch over a few small birds. But a good number of plovers must have survived winter to reach this year’s numbers, said Francie Cuthbert, a professor in the Department of Fisheries,
Wildlife and Conservation Biology at the University of Minnesota who has devoted decades to the plover recovery effort.
“That’s a key thing,” Cuthbert said. “It doesn’t matter how much habitat you have if you don’t have good survival.”
This summer’s success is “a good omen for next year,” Cuthbert said. “The more young out there, the more potential for young to return.”
Also included in the count are three surviving offspring of Nish, one of last summer’s Montrose chicks who took after his parents, fathering the first nest in Ohio in more than 80 years.
“That added another state to the recolonization in the Great Lakes,” Cuthbert said. “And that would not have happened without Chicago.”
Still, despite a “very, very good year” for plovers overall, Cuthbert said, “there were the usual traumas.”
Monty and Rose’s third
summer spent flitting around Montrose Beach started out smooth. Water levels lowered, a habitat expansion from the Chicago Park District provided a nesting buffer and daily life lacked the drama of a possible EDM beachside festival. But, by summer’s end, Monty and Rose again earned their rank among Chicago’s gutsiest birds, establishing a second nest after a skunk incursion.
“We’ve learned a lot from this season,” said Tamima Itani, of the Illinois Ornithological Society and a regular at Montrose Beach. “There are things we can do, and there are things we have no power over.”
After the second clutch of eggs began to hatch, one chick, Siewka, was whisked away to the Lincoln Park Zoo to aid in survival. The chick’s return to the beach was among Itani’s favorite moments from the last three years, she said. Monty and Rose were at first defensive
when a human approached their territory with the chick and performed a brokenwing display. Once the chick was on the ground, the birds transformed.
“They went from this defensive posture to Rose running to the chick and just opening her wing,” Itani said. Monty also helped out, piping in an effort to get the chick to move toward the family, and then brooding the chick.
“They recognized that chick,” Itani said. “It was theirs.”
But two of the four chicks later disappeared — still a mystery to birders.
“We know that there were peregrine falcons and kestrels and Cooper’s hawks and great blue herons and gulls and killdeer — all of those are predators of piping plovers,” Itani said.
It was a long season for the volunteer monitors, too, who have watched over the birds and tracked this summer’s ups and downs.
Monty and Rose lost their first nest with only a few days to go before hatching. And then did it all over again.
Birder Eden Essex plans to be back next season for “the agony and the ecstasy of monitoring.” Essex has monitored since year one with her partner; they call their Saturday shift “date night with the plovers.” What’s changed over the years is the public embrace of the birds, Essex said.
“I think people became much more aware of Monty and Rose, particularly over the pandemic,” Essex said. “And really engaged in the story.”
Some of the best moments come from visitors completely unaware of the plovers, Essex said, especially kids who show up at Montrose and leave the beach with a new story in their back pocket about two pocket-size birds.
“It’s those moments when you see kids, whether they’re aware of Monty and Rose’s story or they become aware of it, that really stick in my heart and my mind,” Essex said.
Imani, one of this summer’s chicks, has been spotted in recent days at Waukegan Beach, where Monty and Rose first met. Itani said she’s hoping for another plover to show up.
“Just in case Monty and Rose’s story repeats itself,” she said.
Itani said she took a trip to Michigan to visit Monty and Rose’s birthplaces. On the way out from Silver Lake State Park, where Monty hatched, she stopped at a post office, and a chat about why she was visiting drew the attention of another customer.
“You should take all the piping plovers back with you to Chicago,” the woman said, citing the inconvenience of some dune shutdowns during plover nesting.
For city birders, that doesn’t sound like a bad idea at all.