Experts wonder how the pandemic will affect endangered birds in Chicago
Piping Plover (Ben McCanna/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images)
CHICAGO - Plovers usually return to places where they’ve successfully nested, but two federally endangered shorebirds have yet to return to the Lake Michigan coast.
On June 18, four piping plovers chicks hatched on Montrose Beach, the area is the pair of plovers favored nesting spot, according to the Chicago Tribune.
Named Monty and Rose, the pair of plovers fledged two chicks by the end of August last year, the first pair to successfully next in Chicago in decades. Now the surviving chicks have a few weeks of dodging predators before flying south and making the second act of Monty and Rose’s species-saving effort.
If the lakefront shutdown continues, and Monty and Rose decide to give Montrose Beach a second shot, a nesting season without volleyball players and beachgoers could mean a better chance of fledgling success.
Brad Semel, an endangered species recovery specialist with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, said the chicks that hatched last month have made an unusual long journey so soon after hatching.
“If they’re going to move from a nesting site they usually wait four or five days,” Semel said. “But they were very intent on moving the youngsters in that short period of time.”
Semel said the birds are considered officially fledged between hatching and day 23.
Antonio Flores of the Chicago Audubon Society, a coordinator in this year’s monitoring effort, said he fell in love instantly watching the plovers.
“When you’re out there monitoring, watching these birds, it feels like you’re touching the cosmos,” Flores said. “It’s not just bird-watching, it’s like you’re guarding an entire line of descendants.”