Snowy Plovers at Alameda

By Ilana DeBare
For the past couple of months, Golden Gate Bird Alliance volunteers have been monitoring the small population of threatened Western Snowy Plovers that have taken up residence on Crown Memorial Beach in Alameda.
Last week, the San Francisco Chronicle picked up the story, with a nice article by Carolyn Jones that featured longtime GGBA activist Leora Feeney and GGBA Executive Director Mike Lynes, as well as East Bay Regional Parks staffer Sharol Nelson-Embry. The Chronicle wrote:
“To the shock of naturalists and bird watchers, a flock of threatened western snowy plovers has taken up residence on one of the Bay Area’s busiest beaches. For the past few months, since the East Bay Regional Park District dumped 82,000 cubic yards of new sand on the beach, the fist-size shorebirds have been skittering across the dunes and pecking at bugs, oblivious to the frolicking hordes around them.
” ‘I was really excited when I heard. There aren’t many of these birds left, and here they are, so easily viewable and accessible,’ said park district naturalist Sharol Nelson-Embry, who works at the nearby Crab Cove Visitor Center.

GGBA volunteers have been working to point out the plovers to joggers and other passersby, so they can detour and avoid disrupting the birds as they rest and forage.  The Chronicle wrote:

The tan-and-white birds are nearly impossible to see and risk getting trampled by beachgoers and overly enthusiastic dogs. And if the birds decide to stay and nest at Crown Beach this spring, their offspring are highly unlikely to survive, creating what scientists call a “biological sink.”
“The birds would put all this energy into reproducing, and then lose every single baby,” Nelson-Embry said. “For a species that’s struggling, that would be a disaster.”
For now, the district is keeping an eye on the birds and hope they head south to the Hayward shoreline, a favorite nesting spot for the Bay Area’s snowy plovers, by March.

For tiny, threatened birds, the plovers seem remarkably fearless. Birder Calvin Waters photographed some last week, including a plover that had been banded for scientific tracking. With help from the East Bay Birding Yahoo group, Calvin contacted Point Blue (formerly PRBO) and learned about the banded bird’s history.

“You have found a plover that was banded as a chick in ’09 at Ravenswood Slough in S.F. Bay,” wrote Frances Bidstrup of Point Blue.  “It was seen later that year at Half Moon Bay with all its colors, but the lower left orange was peeling off.  Shortly after, the bird was at Princeton Harbor, the orange was gone…. Last Dec., the bird was found at Crown Beach and has been seen on a regular basis several times since. A very nice history for this bird and your sighting fills in nicely for 2014 observations.”

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The Snowy Plover story was the Chronicle’s second story about birds and Golden Gate Bird Alliance in the past couple of weeks! On Jan. 18, the paper ran a nice profile of GGBA member Logan Kahle, a 16-year-old expert birder who is undertaking a Big Year. If you missed it in the paper, you can read it here.