About This BlogDuring the western snowy plover breeding season, park docents help monitor and protect nesting sites and help create awareness and educate visitors about this threatened species and its life cycle. Visitors have expressed interest in the plovers and are pleased to have staff and docents in the field answering all types of naturalist questions. Through the summer, park staff create updates to let staff, volunteers, and visitors know the latest on what is happening out at the nesting sites. Click on one of the links below to find out how the Snowy Plovers at Point Reyes were doing at the time. To learn more about becoming a Snowy Plover Docent, please visit our Volunteer page. Snowy Plover Update - September 3, 2021
September 05, 2021
This will be the last breeding snowy plover update for the season. There are no longer any active nests, but two broods of chicks will be fledging by the end of next week! This update includes highlights and summaries from the 2021 breeding season. Snowy Plover Update - August 28, 2021
August 28, 2021
The last western snowy plover nests have hatched in the past couple weeks and we are now focused on monitoring broods until they fledge in early to mid-September. We are currently at 17 fledged chicks for the 2021 season, and we could potentially reach 21 if the five remaining chicks survive to fledge! For comparison, we observed 11 fledged chicks during the 2020 breeding season. Snowy Plover Update - August 20, 2021
August 20, 2021
Snowy plover productivity is looking fantastic this past month and a half. We found two broods near the Abbotts Lagoon area in the past few weeks that had hatched from unknown nests (i.e., we didn’t know these nests existed!). One of these broods already fledged three chicks and the other brood will likely fledge three more today! All six of these chicks will, unfortunately, be unbanded; we found them at a stage where they were highly mobile and nearly impossible to capture. Snowy Plover Update - August 13, 2021
August 13, 2021
We are nearing the end of the breeding season and only one active nest remains. We observed two nest hatches in the past week where chicks didn’t survive for very long after hatch. We are currently at 13 fledged chicks—which is two more than the 2020 season—and we still have five to seven chicks running around, in addition to the three more potential chicks to hatch from the last nest of the season. Snowy Plover Update - August 6, 2021
August 06, 2021
Snowy plover productivity is improving week by week, as the last several weeks of the breeding season are proving to be successful for both nests and chicks. We still have 3 active nests in the park, which could potentially produce 9 more fledglings, on top of the 10 chicks that are currently being raised on Kehoe, North Beach, Abbotts Lagoon, and Limantour. If everything goes perfectly and we observe 100% chick survival, we could end the season with a total of 29 fledglings. Snowy Plover Update - July 23, 2021
July 23, 2021
This is the last month of the breeding season, but the first official update on breeding snowy plovers in Point Reyes. The snowy plover docent program was reinstated last weekend, after a long hiatus due to COVID-19. Stats for the 2021 breeding season: biologists have found 32 total nests, of which 12 have hatched, and 16 have failed, and 4 nests are still active. Thirty-two chicks hatched from 12 nests, of which 10 have been confirmed fledged and ~6 chicks are still alive. |
Last updated: July 18, 2022