Most of my childhood summers were spent in the sand and salt of the Cape Cod National Seashore. I remember taking my plastic shovel down to the shore, the bucket bumping against my legs, chasing the waves and the darting birds whose name I didn’t know. They moved in quick, stuttering bursts, as if the wind animated them — always just ahead of the tide, vanishing and reappearing with the foam.
Back then, I didn’t notice the signs or the stakes. The birds were just part of the landscape, like the dune grass or the clatter of seashells in my plastic pail. But somewhere along the way, I started seeing things differently: sections of beach taped off with rope, birding groups crouched in the dunes with their binoculars trained on the sand. I didn’t know then that this little bird would come to matter so much to me.
The birds were piping plovers, of course, those small shorebirds that can disappear into the sand with their soft, tawny coloring that lets them vanish completely if they stop moving. For a long time, their disappearance wasn’t about camouflage. By the late 1980s, the piping plover population on the Atlantic Coast had dropped to just over 700 breeding pairs. Habitat loss, coastal development, off-leash dogs, and heavy human traffic had pushed them nearly to extinction. In Massachusetts, the population hovered below 200 pairs when I was born.
I’m 28 years old now, and that number has grown more than fivefold. As of last summer, the state recorded a record high of 1,196 breeding pairs, with about half of them on Cape Cod. By early July of this year, two nests had already successfully hatched at White Horse Beach in Plymouth, with rope fencing still in place to protect the chicks through August. The first returning plovers were spotted back in March along the bayside in Orleans and Sandwich, as they are each spring. Their recovery is one of the quiet success stories of modern conservation. It’s also an example of how much effort it takes to enable something endangered simply to survive.
Piping plovers nest in shallow scrapes on open sand. They lay speckled eggs that are almost impossible to see. Their nests are vulnerable to storms, predators, children, dogs, kites, and anyone who wants to walk in a straight line down the beach. Ever since their 1990s Endangered Species Act listing, a coalition of federal agencies, local governments, nonprofits, and volunteers has taken on the job of protecting them. They install fences, put up signs, track nests daily, and construct wire “exclosures” to prevent predators from getting to the eggs.
The beaches I grew up on in Wellfleet, Truro, and Eastham are now places where volunteers reroute beachgoers, monitor hatch rates, and file daily reports. In some towns, it’s become part of the summer rhythm: the parking lots fill, the tide comes in, the birds get counted. Last year, conservation teams recorded an average of 1.24 fledglings per pair, just above the threshold needed to sustain population growth. There’s always a few people who see protecting plovers as an imposition. But the math is clear: this intervention works, and it’s necessary.
It’s easy to miss the point of the plovers. They’re not beautiful in any showy way, they don’t sing, and they don’t symbolize anything, but they’re a case study in what coexistence actually looks like. No sweeping gesture is required, just a series of daily accommodations: rerouting your walk, putting your dog on a leash, not flying your kite over a nesting zone, paying attention.
Now, every time I walk those beaches, I see the plover signs before I see the birds. Rope and posts outline patches of sand that are, for a season, off-limits to us and essential to them. And I feel a tender pride. Not just for the birds but for us — for figuring out, for once, how to stay out of the way.
I get that small, mixed feeling that sometimes comes with progress: gratitude, mostly, but also a kind of quiet guilt. The birds were always there. We just never gave them the right kind of space.
Juliet Leary is a visual artist and writer who learned to chase birds and stories during summers in Wellfleet. She lives in Dover.
