Piping Plovers at Winding Bay

Local report on plovers on the Winding Bay beach……

I walked Winding Bay beach on Thursday and saw 18 piping plovers. One of them was banded, which was pretty exciting – Todd Pover thinks probably in Massachusetts. This photo is not a great photo, but there are AT LEAST 8 piping plovers in it – shows how hard they are to spot. ALSO shows the tire tracks from the Abaco Club beach cleaning tractor, which drives right through there every morning.

By Craig Layman| 2017-12-01T14:02:10-05:00 October 20th, 2015|Categories: Beaches, Birds, migration|3 Comments

About the Author: Craig Layman

My lab’s interdisciplinary pursuits provide for a multi-faceted understanding of environmental change in the coastal realm. We are ecologists, asking questions that span population, community, ecosystem and evolutionary sub-disciplines. We often use a food web based perspective, exploring top-down (e.g., predation) and bottom-up (e.g., nutrient excretion) mechanisms by which animals affect ecosystem processes. All of our efforts are framed within a broader outreach framework, directly integrating science and education, using approaches such as this website.

3 Comments

ali ball October 21, 2015 at 2:39 pm

When I went back there on Sunday (same weather, same time of day), the Club had started grooming the east half of the beach again. That half is now nothing but lots of sand and lots of tire tracks. I only saw one Piping Plover on the whole beach. Not saying the two things are related, but removing all the seaweed certainly discourages the birds that forage in it, nest in it (there was a Wilson’s Plover nest there last season), and generally hang out in it.

Would be nice if somebody from TNC or Audubon told the Abaco Club about the endangered birds on their beach, and asked them not to drive tractors up and down it. Just a thought.
ali ball October 22, 2015 at 12:45 pm

Nine piping plovers on Winding Bay beach this morning, including the one with the band. I’m calling it Mrs. Jones, because it was at the same place, same time, same day as last week.
ali ball October 30, 2015 at 9:36 am

For the third Thursday in a row, Mrs. Jones was hanging out at the same spot on Winding Bay beach. Meanwhile, Keith Kemp has seen another banded bird down there, which he identified as “Tuna”. This bird even has its own blog.

I wrote to the new manager of the Abaco Club, just a “heads up” about all the PIPL on the beach – no reply.