A Nest-Protecting Program Pays Off for Alabama’s Snowy Plovers

Times are tough for Snowy Plovers on the Gulf of Mexico. Climate change delivers more frequent, higher-intensity storms, washing away nests. Development encroaches from the other side of the beaches where they breed. Beachgoers and their unleashed dogs flush parents from roosts, leaving eggs vulnerable to predators and the baking heat. And cats, coyotes, foxes, and ghost crabs gobble up eggs and chicks.

Shorebird populations often ebb and flow from year to year, but recent patterns among Snowy Plovers in Alabama have been alarming. Out of 41 nests monitored between 2018 and 2022 on Dauphin Island, one of the state’s two main nesting sites, just three fledglings survived in total. Only around 68 Snowy Plovers live along the Gulf Coast in Alabama and neighboring Mississippi as of 2024, out of a North American population of about 24,000 to 31,000 individuals. The state’s wildlife agency considers the species of highest conservation concern. “Snowies are an indicator of healthy ecosystems,” says Lianne Koczur, science and conservation director at Alabama Audubon. “If the birds aren’t there, we should all have some sort of alarm bell going off.”

Heeding those alarms, Alabama Audubon staff and local volunteers are working to help Snowy Plovers produce more young and grow their numbers across the state’s 53 miles of Gulf Coast. What began in 2017 as an effort to measure and monitor the population has evolved into a more hands-on program to protect nesting plovers from predators and the public. The results have been promising: Over the past two breeding seasons, 18 Snowy Plover chicks fledged—a major turnaround after five years of almost no chick survival. “I’m so excited that in the past two years we’ve had a record number of snowy fledglings on Dauphin Island,” Koczur says. “It seems like a small thing, but it’s really a huge success.”

Unlike their migratory relatives, many of which nest on saline lakes in Utah and Oklahoma, the Snowy Plovers of the Gulf Coast remain year-round. They are known to wander far along the shore, however, looking for suitable habitat and their own slice of beach. Once they find it, in early spring, pairs start matching up, with males scratching a handful of isolated hollows into the sand and females choosing one to nest in. Both parents dutifully protect two to three black-speckled eggs for about a month. If chicks hatch, the vulnerable puffballs must survive for another month or so before they’re able to take to the skies and seek out their own beachfront territory to live and nest.

Small and inconspicuous in white-gray plumage set against pale beaches, the birds can be tricky to spot. “A lot of times when you’re looking for them on surveys, all you’ll see are their little heads peeking up over the sand footprints,” says Olivia Morpeth, coastal biologist at Alabama Audubon. “I think so much of the issue is that people don’t even realize these birds are out here.”

For decades, scientists didn’t know how many Snowies lived in the area. According to Koczur, no comprehensive effort had been made to track shorebird populations prior to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. The region’s ecosystems often didn’t receive the attention they deserved, says Kara Fox, Gulf Coast restoration director of National Audubon Society. “We certainly are the third coast, many times the forgotten coast,” she says.

Perspectives shifted in the wake of that disaster, says Amy Hunter, Deepwater Horizon restoration coordinator for the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (ADCNR). “During the oil spill, I can’t tell you how many of the coastal mayors said, you know, we realized that our environment and our economy on the Gulf Coast are pretty inextricably linked,” she says. “That includes not just tourism—people coming to the beach—but it also includes birdwatching.”

As scientists tried to quantify bird losses resulting from the spill, their knowledge gaps about the region’s shorebirds became apparent. After the five Gulf states and the federal government reached settlements with BP in 2017 over the disaster, coastal bird stewardship programs from Florida to Texas secured funding to fill in those blanks. Among them was the Alabama Coastal Bird Stewardship Program, which encompasses several other species—Least Terns, Black Skimmers, and Reddish Egrets among them—received settlement funds through the Alabama Trustee Implementation Group. (The National Audubon Society also supports the work with funding from the ADCNR.) As those efforts amassed more data, Snowy Plovers and other shorebirds stood out as suffering some of the steepest population declines.

To address one factor in those losses, the team began complementing its monitoring of Alabama Snowy Plovers with a concerted effort to educate the public about the need to give the birds space. “If people don’t know, then how are they going to care?” says Cortney Weatherby, who began leading that charge in 2021 as Alabama Audubon’s coastal outreach manager.

Weatherby spends most of the March-through-August nesting season on beaches trying to get visitors better acquainted with the shorebirds. She sets up informational tables, intercepts visitors getting too close to nests, and even kayaks near nesting sites to inform boaters about the feathered life on shore. The best way to educate the public about the birds is to point out individuals, she says: Leading visitors on bird walks and sharing spotting scopes to look at different bird species have been powerful outreach tactics. The team also ropes off nests in public areas and puts up signage asking that visitors share the shore.

Thanks to all these efforts, people have not directly caused plover losses in Alabama recently, Morpeth says. Predators are a different story. In the 2019 monitoring season, for example, 65 percent of known Snowy Plover egg failures were due to natural predators like foxes and coyotes. Development along the coast increases the toll those animals take, Morpeth says. “The less natural habitat that those predators have for finding food pushes them to these other habitats where they might not normally look,” she says. Trash left behind by visitors can also attract more mammals to the beach than usual.

To counter the predator threat, the team decided to go on the defense. Taking a cue from Audubon’s coastal stewardship program in Louisiana, in 2023 and 2024 the Alabama Audubon team installed fencing around 11 Snowy Plover nests on Dauphin Island, where predators have been a particular issue. The four-foot-tall barriers deter peckish visitors from reaching eggs but have large enough grate openings for adult Snowy Plovers to come and go freely. On a stretch of coast where the fledging rate had been near zero, now about one plover was fledging for every two nesting pairs—not ideal, but a marked improvement.

The team is considering expanding its fencing efforts to more sites on Dauphin Island and to Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge, the state’s other hotspot for nesting Snowy Plovers. Yet this is more a bandage than a sustainable solution; fencing isn’t feasible for every nesting site and takes a lot of manual labor to set up and maintain throughout the season. “Coastal bird stewardship is never going to be a finished product,” Fox says. “The birds are always going to struggle for that space on the beach to nest.”

This breeding season has only just begun, but the early signs are encouraging. In February Morpeth and a volunteer had already spotted two Snowy Plover fledglings that the Alabama Audubon team banded last year. It’s the first time banded fledglings have returned to Alabama beaches since the program started eight years ago, and the team is watching to see if these Snowies will try to rear another generation here. The promise of two new plovers might not seem like much. But across this coast, for this species, every bird counts.