Visiting our Wintering Piping Plover Pepper

December 2024

My name is Carolyn Lueck. I’m a volunteer and board member with the Lake County Audubon Society. During the summer months I work with the piping plover monitoring team as part of our Sharing Our Shore - Waukegan initiative.

The plovers we monitor are part of the Great Lakes population. Historically, there may have been as many as 800 nesting pairs of plovers along the Great Lakes, but due to habitat loss from beach development and recreation less than 15 pairs remained by the early 1980s. The Illinois population disappeared completely by 1955. As a result, the Great Lakes population was listed as federally endangered in 1986.

In 2023, four captive-reared plovers were released on a restricted beach in Waukegan, IL. This was the first time captive-reared birds were released outside the state of Michigan. The Sharing Our Shore monitoring program deployed monitors to watch over the birds, named Blaze, Marram, Pepper and Sunny, during the weeks they spent gaining the strength and skills to head out on their first migration to wintering grounds.

We were fortunate to learn where two of the plovers spent their winters: Blaze at the Masonboro Inlet in North Carolina and Pepper at Bunche Beach in Fort Meyers, Florida.

In May of 2024, Blaze and Pepper returned to Waukegan and successfuly raised three young chicks. Our monitoring team collectively spent nearly 1,600 hours on a restricted beach watching over the plover family. We also documented the other bird species that used the Waukegan lakefront for breeding and during migration journeys to and from breeding grounds further north.

Monitoring our plover family was truly exhilarating. I spent over 400 hours observing Blaze and Pepper as they incubated their clutch of eggs and shared in their success of protecting three fluffy little hatchlings as they matured into thriving plover fledglings. The first-time parents were both courageous and entertaining, making it hard to say goodbye when they embarked on their second migration south.

Thanks to our connections with monitoring teams in Florida and North Carolina we knew both Blaze and Pepper returned safely to their wintering grounds.

In late November I decided to take a December trip to Florida in a quest to find Pepper on the beaches he calls home from late August to early May. To put it simply: I was going through Plover withdrawal!

As I planned my trip to Florida I was in frequent contact with Cheri Hollis, a volunteer with Sanibel Captiva Conservation Foundation (SCCF) and Audrey Albrecht, a marine biologist with SCCF. Both women work to protect habitat and monitor shorebirds in Lee County, Florida.

Cheri was the volunteer who first spotted Pepper when he landed at Bunche Beach to spend winter after his first migration. She stayed in contact with our team with regular updates until Pepper left in May of this year to head back to Waukegan.

I couldn’t wait to meet Cheri and other passionate individuals who devote so much of their time safeguarding the habitat where Pepper spends his winters.

I hope readers will enjoy some highlights from my adventures in Florida. CLICK HERE and share in my birding adventure!