Post 1: Breeding Grounds

How the Idea For This Project Was Born

It was a bright and humid summer morning. I sat down to brainstorm potential research ideas and realized that though I found the process of avian migration fascinating, I knew next to nothing about it. I found an article discussing the effects that climate change has had on migration timing, added it to the “speed dating” Doc, and moved on.

After considering many other topics, ranging from sexual dimorphism in venomous snakes to the effect of perfect pitch on language acquisition, I decided to hone in on the influence that environmental change has on migration. Birds that migrate altitudinally, generally breeding at high elevations and spending the winter at lower ones, stuck out to me. It’s often the case that these migrations are inconsistent both in an individual’s lifetime and across the species in a given winter, with the decision to migrate or not seemingly down to chance on both levels. Unfortunately, I had no way to go into the field, so the gaps in this topic were too large to fill.

I eventually redirected to how environmental changes had affected the migration of different endangered species. When encouraged to take a narrower focus, I chose one bird, the piping plover. For many reasons, it’s a good choice when considering both the environment and migration.

• They are classified as federally threatened.

• In many states in their range they are listed as endangered.

• They have been the subject of many conservation efforts, meaning that there was plenty of data available that would make conclusions easy to generalize and apply to other shorebirds with overlapping habitats.

• They have a high fidelity to the routes they migrate along and the areas in which they roost, so their wellbeing is dependent on their environment remaining the same.

As I dug more deeply into these plovers, migration faded into the background. I discovered that the piping plover has been the subject of five international censuses (their range extends beyond the United States into Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean) and one of the most extensive programs to preserve breeding grounds conducted in the country. In contrast, the wintering grounds were somewhat neglected, with inconclusive results about what drew the birds to certain areas and uncertainty about where over 1,000 of them spend the winter. As I dug through the censuses more, it became clear that piping plovers were clustering in larger groups as the years went by, abandoning zones that had been in use for decades. This sort of behavior is unusual in any bird, but especially concerning when this bird has no precedent for making these sorts of changes.

I came to the conclusion that I had to understand what motivated these changes. Through my previous research I knew that climate change has been slowly altering migration timing and plant life cycles, making it harder for migratory birds to get proper nutrition. That was unlikely to be the root cause, as the diet of most plover species consists mainly of invertebrates rather than plant life. The next most likely reason would be that human interference had rendered habitats unusable. This assumption makes more sense, given that the Gulf of Mexico has been undergoing land development to establish new housing and propagate oil and gas operations for decades. I thus was able to build a project around the question, “What effects has increased land development had on the wintering grounds of the piping plover (Charadrius melodus) and how can these be minimized to ensure effective conservation?”

I plan to utilize some of the available body of work, data available on various state and federal sites, and satellite imagery to conduct an in depth analysis of the areas that the piping plover is abandoning contrasted with the areas that they’re flocking to. Land development will be a significant factor in that analysis. My project was approved and I will be updating this blog over the next few months as my research progresses.