Pennsylvania's beaches lost their piping plovers in the mid-1950s - the little sand-colored shorebirds simply stopped coming, and for more than sixty years the state's Lake Erie shore went without them [1]. The comeback got a milestone on Monday: the Pennsylvania Game Commission marked the birds' tenth consecutive nesting season at Presque Isle State Park [1].
The numbers behind the decade are small and hard-won, which is what makes them worth counting. Since a pair first returned to nest in 2017, the recovery partnership - the Game Commission, the Erie Bird Observatory, state conservation agencies and the US Fish and Wildlife Service - has supported 20 nesting pairs and fledged 47 chicks on those beaches [2]. This season, at least 8 chicks hatched from 3 nests by the start of July, sharing the shore with a nesting pair of endangered common terns [3]. Worldwide, only about 4,000 breeding pairs of piping plover exist; the Great Lakes population is federally endangered [2].
The state made it official, too: House Resolution 580 declared July 18 'Piping Plover Day,' and Presque Isle celebrated with a festival on the beach the birds took back [1][3]. Cathy Haffner, the Game Commission's recovery coordinator, put the decade in its honest frame: 'Although our small population is extremely fragile, the Pennsylvania Game Commission and our team of partners are unwavering in our commitment to ensuring these remarkable birds endure for generations to come' [1].
Ten years, twenty pairs, forty-seven chicks - a bird that was gone for sixty years now has its own day on the calendar of the state that lost it [1][2].
