Snowy Plovers Nest on Point Reyes's Drakes Spit for the First Time Since the 1980s

The Drakes Spit nest, caught in the middle of hatching. NPS photo by Wanda Bonneville.

A surprise on the first survey

On July 8, 2024, National Park Service monitoring volunteer Wanda Bonneville set out on her first breeding survey for western snowy plovers on Drakes Spit at Point Reyes National Seashore. Neither she nor the park's plover biologists expected to find nesting — or even adult plovers — on the now broad spit. No nesting had been seen there since the late 1980s.

Near the end of the spit, two adult plovers began calling in distress and doing broken-wing displays. Remembering her training, Bonneville searched carefully and found the nest in the open sand: two chicks had hatched and were fairly dry, and a third was still working its way out of its egg.

A place plovers used to use

• Biologists from Point Reyes Bird Observatory — now Point Blue Conservation Science — monitored plovers on Drakes Spit in 1986–1989, and again from 1995. In the 80s they found up to four adults nesting there. Point Blue still monitors breeding plovers at Point Reyes with the Park Service.
• The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's 2007 recovery plan for the threatened western snowy plover named the area important habitat for the species' recovery.

Banding the family

The next morning, Bonneville returned with plover monitoring leads Matt Lau (the Park Service wildlife biologist who wrote the account), Carleton Eyster and Aiko Goldston, to band the chicks for the park's plover monitoring and management program. They found all three chicks with both adults more than 150 feet from the nest, caught them all, and banded the chicks and the unbanded father. The mother, already banded — blue and orange on the left leg, red and yellow on the right — turned out to be a one-year-old from Zmudowski State Beach on Monterey Bay.

A Point Blue Conservation Science biologist checks the color bands of the adult female, a one-year-old from Zmudowski State Beach. NPS photo by Wanda Bonneville.

Why they came back

Drakes Spit grows and shrinks as wind and sea reshape it, and after some smaller years it has been large for a while. Beach debris has piled up, along with coarse rock and sand that can camouflage a nest. No one can say for sure why plovers left or why this pair returned, but the habitat may have cycled back into a state plovers like.

Fledged

The team checked on the brood at least weekly. Chicks take about 28 days on average to fledge — to grow, fly, and become independent of the adult male. By August 5, two of the three had fledged.

Adult plovers tend to return to sites where they've nested successfully, and young birds often come back to the beach where they hatched. The team hopes the family will be back next year — and that plovers regularly nesting on this former habitat would be a small but exciting step toward their recovery.

More: Point Reyes western snowy plovers, 2024 season updates, volunteering as a plover docent, and the San Francisco Bay Area Network's plover monitoring.

Sources

Based on Matt Lau, "Snowy Plover Monitoring Volunteer Makes a Surprise Discovery," National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. A partner's photograph is not reproduced.