Chicago’s piping plover population may grow after Searocket and Imani laid their first egg of the season on the Montrose Beach Dunes shoreline Sunday morning, a little over a week since their reunion for Mother’s Day weekend.
Volunteer monitors said they are waiting on Searocket, the female plover, to lay three more eggs in this nesting attempt. This marks the second breeding season for her and Imani — the son of local celebrities Monty and Rose, who in June 2019 became the first of the species to return to Chicago and the larger Cook County area in 71 years.
Last year, four eggs hatched to Searocket and Imani, but only one survived. Necropsies performed by the Lincoln Park Zoo determined they had died from a “failure to thrive” — essentially of natural causes — according to Tamima Itani, lead volunteer coordinator for Chicago Piping Plovers. On average, 1.5 piping plovers in a nest of four in the wild make it to fledge, according to Michigan State University’s W.K. Kellogg Bird Sanctuary.
The surviving hatchling was named Nagamo, which means “he/she sings” in Ojibwe, one of the languages spoken by the Anishinaabe people — whose traditional homeland the city of Chicago is located on. Nagamo hasn’t returned yet, though this is not unusual for first-year returnees, which tend to come back in late May to early June. After migrating south for the winter, about a third of piping plovers hatched in the wild return to their birthplace during their first summer.
Also at Montrose this year is 2-year-old Pippin, a returning male from Green Bay, Wisconsin, who is also looking for a female to nest with. The birds are known for pairing up to rear their young.
The three-generation family at Montrose Beach is part of an ongoing effort to restore the Great Lakes piping plover population, a federally protected endangered species that reached an all-time low of 13 pairs in the 1980s after habitat loss due to beach development. Before the dramatic drop, 500 to 800 piping plover pairs nested in the Great Lakes, according to the National Audubon Society. Thanks to recent conservation efforts, their numbers have since rebounded to around 80 breeding pairs.
