The Montrose Piping Plover Chicks Banded 7/20/21

Today, a team of biologists from the Great Lakes Piping Plover Conservation Team (GLPIPL) placed color bands on the four piping plover chicks at Montrose Beach Dunes. The color bands will identify the birds as Great Lakes Piping Plovers and as Monty and Rose’s Montrose chicks.   

The Bird Banding Laboratory of the U.S. Geological Survey manages a 100-year old program of learning about birds through banding. Each of the banded Great Lakes Piping Plovers receives a USGS aluminum band with a unique 9-digit number. They also get a combination of color-band patterns so they can be recognized by sight or from photos.  Every sibling in a family gets the same color and arrangement of three or four bands (depending on the combination used). This is called a "brood marker combination." There aren't enough combinations available to give every chick their own unique identifier from hatching, but by giving the chicks from the same family, or brood, the same combination we can study such things as parental success, fledging rates, and return success. We use specific colors to identify breeding areas so we can usually tell where a chick hatched. The Chicago birds are identified with a purple band (the Ohio chicks were banded with purple as well, but on the opposite leg of the Chicago chicks).  We put a colored star (red, blue, yellow or green) on the orange bands so that we can distinguish the chicks while they remain at Montrose. The orange band identifies them as Great Lakes Piping Plovers. Great Lakes Piping Plover chicks are banded between five and fifteen days old. Monty and Rose’s chicks are 13, 12 and 10 days old today. The bands are made of either plastic or aluminum, which makes them extremely lightweight. For more information about the Great Lakes Piping Plover Recovery banding program, please visit  https://www.greatlakespipingplover.org/banding.  

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Banded plover chicks released back to their parents by Clare Tan (UMN), Stephanie Beilke (COS/Audubon Great Lakes), Cassi Saari (Chicago Park District) and Claire Raver (Cardno). Photo courtesy of Cindy Mom, GLPIPL Team 

The Chicago 2021 Piping Plover chicks are banded as follows: 

  • X,-:O,V (Blue Star): Silver band on upper left leg, no band on lower left leg, Orange band with Blue Star on upper right leg, Purple band on lower right leg  

  • X,-:O,V (Red Star): Silver band on upper left leg, no band on lower left leg, Orange band with Red Star on upper right leg, Purple band on lower right leg 

  • X,-:O,V (Yellow Star): Silver band on upper left leg, no band on lower left leg, Orange band with Yellow Star on upper right leg, Purple band on lower right leg 

  • X,-:O,V (Green Star): Silver band on upper left leg, no band on lower left leg, Orange band with Green Star on upper right leg, Purple band on lower right leg.  This is the chick hatched at the Lincoln Park Zoo and sports a green star to reflect the color of the Lincoln Park Zoo. 

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The fourth chick which hatched in the care of the Lincoln Park Zoo has a green star.  Photo courtesy of Cindy Mom, GLPIPL Team 

The Chicago Piping Plover chicks are the only chicks in the Great Lakes to have color stars on their orange bands, in honor of Chicago and Illinois. Typically, Great Lakes chicks have a colored dot on their band.  

The endangered Great Lakes Piping Plover population, once down to less than twenty pairs and only in Michigan, has rebounded thanks to recovery efforts. This year so far, the Great Lakes Piping Plover banding team has banded 148 chicks, including these 4 at Montrose, on beaches in Illinois, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and in Ontario, Canada.  

Great Lakes Piping Plover recovery work is supported by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service with funding through the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative.   

Many thanks to everyone who has made this happy event possible!  The Chicago Park District has been hard at work ensuring that protections are in place for the plover nesting area, and working with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, the USDA Wildlife Services, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in monitoring the safety of the birds. The efforts of the Chicago Park District and the volunteer habitat steward who manage the natural area of Montrose Beach Dunes, in conjunction with scores of volunteers, created habitat that supports these endangered birds. Piping Plover monitors coordinated by the Illinois Ornithological Society, the Chicago Audubon Society, and the Chicago Ornithological Society are now onsite helping to protect the plovers and to explain to beachgoers the importance of giving these endangered chicks space to eat and rest. 

Thank you to the Great Lakes Piping Plover (GLPIPL)/University of Minnesota team for coming to Montrose to band our little Piping Plover chicks!   

Banding team pictured: Rachel Fields (UMN), Cindy Mom (GLPIPL), Claire Raver (Cardno), Cassi Saari (CPD), Stephanie Schubel (GLPIPL), Sarah Saunders (Audubon), Adam Hartman, Clare Tan (UMN), Louise Clemency (USFWS), Stephanie Beilke (COS/Audubon), Not pictured: Carrick Rice (USDA). Photo courtesy of Cindy Mom GLPIPL

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