Witnessing a rebirth. Park releases Piping Plover chicks into the wild

From staff reports

Sleeping Bear Dunes wildlife biologist Vince Cavalieri has taken part in dozens of piping plover chick releases.

“They are always special as they represent the culmination of hundreds of hours of work by a lot of different people and, of course, offer a second chance at life for the birds,” he said following the release of five captive reared plovers at Glen Haven on Wednesday, Aug. 20.

“This one was a little extra special as I had actually been present at the hatching of two of the five chicks in the vehicle I was driving.”

The plovers, an endangered shorebird, winter together on the Gulf Coast and migrant during the breeding season to the Great Plains, the Atlantic Coast and the Great Lakes. Regional staff and volunteers typically see between 75 and 80 nesting pairs. That’s a remarkable increase from the 17 pairs that existed when the bird was put on the endangered species list in 1986, said Cavalieri.

But this year they documented 94 different adult piping plovers along the Sleeping Bear shoreline, not all of whom bred here. The total Great Lakes population registered 88 pairs, of which 34 were spotted at Sleeping Bear. That’s an increase of seven pairs over the 81 found in 2024. Cavalieri said they can tell the individuals apart as nearly all plovers in the Great Lakes population have unique color band combinations.

“For a population that often measures success in one or two more pairs per year, a jump of seven was pretty remarkable,” said Cavalieri. “The recovery goal is 150 pairs across the Great Lakes so we have a long way to go, but 88 felt pretty good this year.”

Of the five plover chicks released at Glen Haven on Aug. 20, three came from nests on South Manitou Island and two came from North Manitou. All were abandoned by their parents.

Cavalieri explained that, while the majority of nest abandonments in piping plovers happen because one of the adult pair is lost, in this case both the nests were late renests; and the adults gave up on the nests before they hatched. The plover population had a high amount of predation (on chicks and eggs) in 2025 so adults renested more than normal. In the case of the South Manitou nest, said Cavalieri, the adults nearly stayed long enough on the eggs for them to hatch in the wild.

“So close, in fact, that when one of my plover monitors brought the eggs off the island on a Thursday afternoon, she barged into my office to announce that they were hatching!” said Cavalieri.

“Indeed, two of the eggs hatched in a portable incubator as I immediately drove them up to our piping plover captive rearing station at the University of Michigan Biological Station in Pellston. This was a first for me in my 16 seasons years on the piping plover project.”