While we often highlight the youth crew leaders and members who train with us and work on USFWS Refuges across New England during the summer season, we also hire for specialty seasonal positions and internships. These employees are trained by and work alongside USFWS scientists on specific conservation goals for that refuge. At the Rhode Island National Wildlife Refuge Complex, this includes Nicole DeFelice, a Shorebird Biological Technician who was slated to be the leader of a Shorebird intern crew this year, but due to COVID-19 is covering the full slate of shorebird monitoring and protection without a crew this year. Her tasks include performing biweekly monitoring of ten different beaches, looking for piping plover activity such as territory establishment, nesting, and the raising of chicks to fledgling age.
We recently caught up with Nicole and her work at the RI NWRC, and she sent us an update of their work so far this season, along with some wonderful photos of the federally threatened piping plovers she is helping to monitor and protect.
“In the beginning of the breeding season we try to sight every piping plover we can on the beach. This involves walking around with a spotting scope and scanning the beach for the small, well camouflaged birds. We keep our eyes peeled for any colored bands and tiny flags on their legs that will have a three digit code as a way to identify the bird. This makes it a lot easier to decipher which bird is which since males and females look very similar. Once we get a sense of established pairs that seem to be defending territories, we will start the posting.
Piping plovers are very habitual and tend to nest in almost the same exact spot they did the previous year, so we usually post these “hotspot” areas. Posting is labor intensive. We pound U-posts into the sand and connect them with yellow ropes and put up many signs that indicate that these areas are roped off for federally protected species (the Piping Plover and the Least Tern) and lots of “no dog” signs since dogs are a huge disturbance to the birds.
Then we look for scrapes. Piping plovers’ nests are usually very hard to find. They dig a small impression in the sand and that’s about it. If they’re feeling artsy, they might line the outer edge with some shells. So we walk a zig zag pattern along the beach, assuring we search every inch. The tell tale sign of finding a scrape are their pigeon toed tracks. Usually if the scrape is well maintained we will see tons of tracks going in and out of the scrape in all directions. We will mark it with our GPS and check those scrapes the next time we come onto the beach.
Once they start laying eggs, the birds’ behavior changes. They will get very vocal and might give you a “broken wing” display where they attempt to distract you from getting too close to the nest. Once we find the nest and depending on the beach, we might exclose the nest. By exclosing the nest, we are attempting to keep out any predators that might want to eat the eggs. Predators include crows, hawks, peregrine falcons, coyotes, foxes, mink, skunks, gulls, and owls.
We just had our first piping plover nest hatch this past week which is very exciting!!”
