HIGH ISLAND, MI – A small, sandy gray and white shorebird ran toward two familiar wildlife biologists, stopping short of where they stood on the shoreline of a rocky spit on the northeast corner of High Island.
That individual Great Lakes piping plover is somewhat of an ambassador for the endangered species on the uninhabited island in northern Lake Michigan west of Beaver Island. Scientists with the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa have, for 20 years, been traveling to the remote island to monitor the plovers as they nest and fledge their chicks. And this bird became a bit of favorite in recent years.
“He’s named Biimaajii, which means ‘he stirs about’ because he kind of runs around like he owns the place,” said Bill Parsons, a scientist in the tribe’s natural resources department.
It’s been a record year for Great Lakes piping plovers, a species first federally listed as endangered in 1985. This year scientists counted 80 unique breeding pairs across all five Great Lakes and monitored 85 nests. That’s eight more pairs than last year and the most since the species was first added to the federal Endangered Species List.
The final count on plover chicks successfully fledged across the Great Lakes is expected yet this month.
“The plovers are an endangered shorebird that the numbers were critically low in the ‘80s. And they’ve slowly, the population has slowly rebuilt to the point now where there’s nesting plovers on all five Great Lakes. For the past few years, there’s been 75, 76 nesting pairs. And we’ve had our best year as far as chick productivity here on High Island this year,” Parsons said.
On July 19, 2023, he and fellow wildlife biologist Derek Hartline took one of their weekly trips to the far-flung island in the Beaver Island archipelago to check up on the plovers. This time they intended to count how many of this season’s hatched chicks were fledged and which remained fuzzy, little puffballs still unable to fly and fend for themselves.
They quickly found Biimaajii (pronounced beh-meh-JEE in the Indigenous Anishinaabemowin language) as he ran circles around a bunch of plover chicks with their full feathers, brooding them as they built up strength for their coming first flight to the Atlantic or Gulf coasts.
Hartline peered through a spotting scope and called out directions to Parsons, who had a long-lens camera. Both honed in on the group with their gear.
“I think all seven are right there, Bill. Yeah – one, two, three, four, five, six, seven – and Biimaajii is right there walking toward them,” Hartline said while Parsons rapid-fired his camera’s shutter.
The beloved adult bird is easily differentiated from other plovers by his ankle tags in the colors of the tribal medicine wheel, yellow, red, and black, with an orange flag and a silver federal band. He seemed to be helping another male adult plover – presumably his own offspring – with what would in human terms be called his grandchildren.
Next the scientists spotted two chicks that weren’t yet fledged, little living cotton balls with toothpick legs that pitter-pattered along the beach. Their male parent named BRR repeatedly flew at and chased the larger plover chicks away from his late-nest hatchlings that were only 13 days old.
Quite a flock of shorebirds gathered on the High Island spit that day. Brown and white sanderlings with their black beaks and legs ran among the plovers. Various seagulls lingered about. The scientists even spotted a male piping plover from Pennsylvania, a migrating bird making a pit stop on its way south.
The female piping plovers were already gone on their journey south. They always leave behind the male plovers to raise the chicks.
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Parsons said 2023 is the best season for the number of piping plovers observed on High Island. But there were heartbreaks, too.
“We have had some issues with depredation or predation of the adults. We’ve had a merlin, which is a small falcon, take three of our nesting adults. And then we also had a Caspian tern kill one of our females just recently. So that was on our nest No. 7. And unfortunately, that nest failed,” he said.
Not all the hatched chicks survived either. Parsons and Hartline were even there one day when a merlin snatched up a chick and flew away with it still cheeping.
“That was terrible,” Hartline said, shaking his head.
The raptor seemed to home in on the protective enclosures installed around the first three nests, somehow crashing through the netting and killing plovers as they incubated eggs. The tribal scientists worked with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and collectively decided not to use the barriers around the next four nests found on High Island.
While there were no more confirmed losses to merlin after that, the Caspian tern attack did happen and resulted in the death of Biimaajii’s on-and-off nesting partner named Miigaaza.
“First time that we’ve ever documented that,” Parsons said.
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The scientists also reported that when they returned to High Island on Aug. 1, they found only one of the two youngest plover chicks that were still fuzzy back during that mid-July visit with MLive journalists.
“It looks like one of the two made it. We saw them both a week ago but also observed a merlin that day, too,” Parsons said via email.
A bright side for the High Island plovers this year is that the scientists collected 12 eggs from the three nests attacked by merlin. Ten of those eggs hatched in captivity at the University of Michigan Biological Station in Pellston and those chicks will be released into the wild.
Parsons said that even with the losses, the record success of plovers on High Island this year is worth celebrating – 18 fledged piping plover chicks between those hatched on the island and in captivity.
“This is the best year that we’ve had for monitoring as far as the total number of adults observed and the number of nests and chicks produced. We’ve definitely, over that 20 years, seen that the population is slowly, incrementally successful, but we’re nowhere near the target for rehabilitation of the population,” he said.
A critical part of the tribe’s goal with its plover monitoring program is to protect the habitat on the remote island so the species can continue to flourish. The depredation losses in such a remote location only underscores the importance of continued protections for the endangered plovers across the Great Lakes, the scientists agreed.
“We’re out in the middle of Lake Michigan, so there’s not the normal ground nesting predators that you would see on the mainland. So, we don’t have skunks, possums, raccoons, and other ground predators here on this island. There’s not a lot of people that come here. And fortunately, most of the folks that do make it here are environmentally conscious and are aware of the piping plover,” Parsons said.
“Being an endangered species, one of the things that we strive to manage for in the tribal culture and philosophy is to manage for seven generations. So, we’re trying to protect this spot for future generations so that we continue to have this endangered species here in the future.”
Read more of our Beaver Island coverage here.
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