Lady scientist in love

By Sarah Bearup-Neal
Sun contributor

The fifth in a series of articles prompted by the National Park Service’s centennial celebration of its founding in 1916. One of the NPS’s birthday initiatives is “Find Your Park” — a multi-pronged program that invites people to discover the National Park in their backyard. Throughout 2015, the Sun is publishing stories about the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore and relationships that people in our community have developed with it.

Francesca J. Cuthbert is a woman working in the field of science. And she did fall in love, just as Tim Hunt – the recently disgraced English biochemist and Nobel winner — said “girls” in the lab do.

But Cuthbert’s love affair began as a summer camper in the 1960s when she “fell in love with coastal dunes and islands in the Great Lakes,” she said June 11 at the opening Research Rendezvous lecture, a monthly series of talks about studies being conducted in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. The talks are delivered year-round at the visitor center in Empire.

Cuthbert’s love affair led not to the disruptive laboratory situation of Hunt’s assertion, but to a 30-year long study of the Great Lakes Piping Plover. Cuthbert is a professor at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation. She supervises this project’s research and banding program. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is the lead agency working on Piping Plover recovery.

“If there was a capital for the Piping Plover, it would be Sleeping Bear,” Cuthbert said of the stocky sand-colored shorebird who arrives here in April and departs in August. The national park is occupies “a spectacular piece of land” with more than 64 miles of shoreline; and the National Park Service here practices a “proactive management philosophy” that has contributed to the once-endangered shore bird’s encouraging return in this region.

The Piping Plover is only found in the North America — on the Great Plains, 2,300 nesting pairs; the Atlantic Coast, 1,900 nesting pairs; and in the Great Lakes where the number of nesting pairs is estimated at 70. They may winter in the southeastern US, but these little shorebirds are genetically programmed to return to north when it is time to breed. The number of breeding pairs in the North America is “a small and vulnerable number,” Cuthbert said.

Earlier in the last century, Piping Plovers could be found more widely distributed throughout the Great Lakes region and into Canada, Cuthbert said. But even with an estimated 200 to 300 breeding pairs, the birds were “vulnerable to begin with.” The Piping Plover was put on the federal Endangered Spices list in 1986. The number of nesting pairs was estimated at 12 to 17, which rendered Piping Plovers “basically extinct in the Great Lakes region,” Cuthbert said. How did this happen? Let Cuthbert count the ways. She begins with hunting.

It was a common practice to hunt shorebirds for meat, “which is strange because they only weigh 50 grams,” Cuthbert said. That’s just under two ounces. Another threat to the birds came under the heading of scientific collection. Museums and universities started building up their collections of eggs and adult specimens. It is, Cuthbert said, “a dark issue,” i.e. killing in the name of academic research.

Piping Plovers are hardwired to return to their ancestral nesting grounds — sandy beaches and rocky shores — which are also coveted by human beings. “People like to build their summer homes on really gorgeous stretches of beach,” Cuthbert said. And accompanying humans to their shoreline homes are Plover predators, i.e. Fido and Boots-the-cat.

Rounding out the long list of Piping Plover threats are “environmental uncertainty and climate change,” Botulism E outbreaks and human-caused catastrophies such as the Deep Water Horizon oil spill.

The antidote to these threats is a recovery plan, a plan that “ensures as many eggs, chicks and adults survive to contribute to future population growth and sustainability,” Cuthbert said. The goal is to bring the number of Great Lakes nesting pairs up to 150. The population needs to stay at that number for five years to be considered stable, and for delisting from the Endangered Species List. This recovery plan is executed with a small army of paid staff and volunteers who monitor, do daily nest checks, count chicks; and partners representing state and federal wildlife and conservation agencies; zoos; universities; and bird conservation groups. The recovery plan now in place for the Great Lakes region was approved by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2003.

Why all this hoopla about a little bird? Piping Plovers are an “umbrella species,” which is to say that if the Piping Plover is protected, so, too, are a multitude of other beasts and creatures. The lives of the Piping Plover are interrelated with that of the Pitcher’s Thistle and Dwarf Iris, both listed as threatened by the US Fish and Wildlife Service; the Lake Huron Locust, a state-threatened insect, and a vast array of worms, crustaceans and mollusks. These plants and animals are also found in the Piping Plovers’ beach and shoreline breeding habitats. If Plovers are doing well, chances are good these other guys are, too.

Helping to execute the Great Lakes recovery plan is Maple City resident Alice Van Zoeren who for 12 years has been employed as Cuthbert’s seasonal research assistant in the local park. She’s a member of the Sleeping Bear Piping Plover crew, 15 volunteers who search for nests, put up protective enclosures, monitor nests daily. Van Zoeren bands the little birds with color-coded leg bands that tells monitors where the Great Lakes birds go in the winter, their migration routes, mortality rates and fidelity to a mate. For the last six years, she has worked in winter to collect “on-line reports of our plovers on the wintering grounds and in migration,” she said.

Cuthbert’s work with Piping Plovers generates data, tons of numbers and other dry facts that don’t necessarily enflame human passion for action. So, how does all this data move human beings from a position of detachment and intellectualized interest to a feeling of investment and commitment to the birds’ future?

“My work, and that of my students, has not played a major role in public education,” Cuthbert wrote in a recent email. “However, we work closely with the managing agencies to provide information of interest and relevance to the public. We’ve also done research to determine what Plovers need to be successful. This info then translates into Plover management decisions.”

Beach monitors are another tool in the recovery kit. They interact with the public, do “spot education” with the owners of dogs who run off-leash in nesting areas. “And one of my graduate students is developing social media to connect the public to Plover conservation,” Cuthbert wrote. That website is: www.glpipl.wordpress.com

In 1986 there were zero Piping Plovers nesting in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. Today, a third of all Great Lake Plovers nest here. The birds’ on-going recovery is the direct result of the park’s “strong management philosophy.”

“Sleeping Bear has always been willing to make tough decisions” on behalf of Piping Plovers, Cuthbert said. Trails and other areas of the park favored by humans, for instance, have been closed so that Plovers can move along with their lives in peace.

“This is why you see so many birds here,” Cuthbert said. “I can say with 100 percent certainty, if it were not for the Sleeping Bear, the story of the Piping Plover in the Great Lakes would be a very different one.”

The Research Rendezvous talks about studies conducted in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore continue throughout the year. A schedule of the talk can be found at: Nps.gov/slbe/planyourvisit/calendar.htm.