This story was originally published on LincolnChronicle.org and is used with permission.
Megan Hoff stepped into a time machine this summer when she walked onto the beach near her Newport home to monitor the health and well-being of western snowy plovers.
Sticking to the dry-sand areas of the beach, Hoff saw not one, not two, not three tiny nests. And as her eyes grew wider, she tallied even more.
As she continued to count, she called Roy Lowe, a Waldport resident who coordinates snowy plover monitoring efforts in Lincoln County, and almost breathlessly reported each new sighting.
“There’s another one!” she said, before hanging up and calling back with almost the same message just moments later. The calls didn’t end until she had counted a whopping seven nests spread across a portion of the beach.
Most outings are considered fruitful if they pinpoint even a single nest.
“That was a really exhilarating moment for me,” said Hoff, a Lincoln County planning department employee who does her monitoring in the sunrise hours before work. “It gave me a glimpse into the past, into what our beaches would have looked like before human impacts created so many disturbances on the beach.”
Unfortunately, with the 2025 summer nesting season just concluded, it’s clear that the numbers of nests, hatched eggs and fully fledged plovers in Lincoln County won’t come close to matching the impressive one-day total recorded by Hoff three months ago.
Of the 45 nests sited and marked by volunteers early in the season, four fledged chicks made it out and onto their own, said Lowe, a retired federal wildlife biologist. Another three chicks remain unaccounted for.
Those numbers compare with 44 nests each of the past two seasons and 29 in 2022, when 13 chicks were marked as fully fledged, he said.
Not bad, perhaps, for a uniquely West Coast species that had dwindled so far in the early 1990s – to only 35 to 50 birds statewide — that they were labeled by the federal government as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
But one that certainly appears in need of continued monitoring and protection.
“What’s pretty clear to me is that this is a species that we can’t walk away from,” Lowe said. “If we want them in Oregon, we are going to have to continue managing for them.”
Ample challenges
Of the myriad shore birds and other critters that beach visitors may see on any given outing, western snowy plovers are unique. That’s because they are the only avian species to exclusively nest directly in dry-sand areas, including dunes.
Adult plovers can run if threatened by crows, ravens, foxes or off-leach dogs, but chicks in their nests have nowhere to hide.
Which is why monitors say it’s so important to steer a wide berth for anyone walking near ropes and signs posted alerting that a nesting site is nearby.
“If you’re not looking for them, you might not even know they’re there,” said Nancy Thomas, a Waldport resident who heads out frequently to look for new nests and check the progress of sites already identified. “Without continued protection, we might not have these birds in the future.”
Other, arguably larger obstacles standing between plovers and long-term success include loss of habitat and the obvious difficulty in implementing predator controls in areas adjacent to popular parks and campgrounds.
Lincoln County beaches, in particular, don’t lend themselves to plover habitat, Lowe said, because they tend to be narrow, wind and wave swept, and not prone to offering the kind of vast, dry-sand areas the birds rely on.
That explains why Lincoln County, alone among the seven Oregon counties that feature shorelines, has no active state plover management areas, he said.
“There just aren’t a lot of areas to combat invasive grasses and do dune restoration work,” Lowe said. “It’s going to be a continuing problem.”
As evidence, he pointed to a 1939 photograph taken at the time surveying efforts were first being launched for residential and commercial developments at Bayshore just north of the Alsea Bay Bridge at Waldport.
“The dunes there used to be sprawling,” he said. “And all of that would have been snowy plover habitat.”
That human touch
Volunteers say the worst part of their mission may be dealing with human intrusions into areas clearly marked as nested.
Sometimes, they add, the intrusions appear to be as purposeful as they are damaging.
Hoff, for instance, has encountered instances where people have cut protective ropes strung around nesting sites and thrown down poles and signs warning beach walkers of nests.
But intrusions, whether intentional or due to lack of attention, remain unwelcome, Hoff said.
“We’ve never documented anyone taking or smashing eggs,” she said. “But even letting an unleashed dog run through there is enough to freak the birds out. And if the adults are forced off their nests, that just opens the whole situation up to predation by birds and other creatures. It’s definitely a situation that is preventable.”
Definite upsides
Still, there have been plenty of successes, which Lowe and his flock of volunteers will continue to monitor as winter nesting season gears up, when the birds most often roost and forage together in flocks or leave the area entirely for far-flung stops up and down the West Coast.
A few examples from this summer’s nesting season, many facilitated by the colorful bands volunteers try to attach to chicks’ legs for long-term identification soon after hatching:
One plover from near Camp Pendleton in southern California has now been spotted here every summer since 2020.
Banding identified another plover that was born this year at California’s Monterey Bay. When it was seven weeks old, it took flight and was reported six days later at Humboldt Bay, six days after that at Bandon and then, more recently, in Newport.
And, for the first time in 50 years, a nest was spotted at Salishan near Gleneden Beach. Lowe has since recruited a couple who live in the area to act as nest monitors.
Ahead, Lowe said he is looking forward to a Nov. 19-20 meeting in Newport, when virtually anyone or any agency associated with plover recovery efforts will meet to discuss findings and future options.
“One thing for sure is that you never know what you’ll see on the beach,” Lowe said.
Equally as intriguing, he could have added, are the feathery little gems you may never even see.
- Dana Tims is an Oregon freelance writer who contributes regularly to Lincoln Chronicle and can be reached at DanaTims24@gmail.com