Incubation on track for Imani, Sea Rocket
Catching up with resident Piping Plover pair.
It’s been a few weeks since I wrote about Chicago’s Piping Plovers, so here is the latest. The female Sea Rocket returned to Montrose Beach about four weeks ago, ending Imani’s two-year wait for a possible companion.
The pair got right down to “business,” and the first egg was laid about a week later. There’s a full clutch of four eggs now, and a wire exclosure has been placed over the nest to protect the birds and the eggs from predators. The eggs are on track to hatch about two weeks from now.
When I visited last week, Imani was on the nest and Sea Rocket was down at the shore feeding. There had just been a nest exchange about 15 minutes before I got there. The site is in a windswept sandy area, within the fenced-off Montrose Beach Dunes Natural Area. It’s somewhat close to the spot where Imani was hatched three years ago. It’s an area dotted with sandbar willow, scouring rush, the eponymous sea rocket, and loads of cottonwood saplings.
I’m struck by how much lower Lake Michigan’s water levels are since reaching a modern high four years ago. Low levels don’t receive many headlines, but the receding lake has left much more sand on the beach.
A note about “Green Dot,” the Green Bay, Wis., male that also was at Montrose. He is still in Chicago, but hanging on the other side of the dune area from Imani and Sea Rocket. He has now been dubbed “Pippin” by the monitors in Wisconsin. It’s getting late for Pippin to find a mate, but his presence is an interesting development and may bode well for a future of multiple pairs in town.
‘Finding’ a plover egg
The Sun-Times reported about Sea Rocket’s first egg on May 31, in a piece “Piping plover egg found at Montrose Beach.” I suppose the construct of the headline hinges on what your definition of “found” is. Most of Imani and Sea Rocket’s movements have been observed by humans since the birds paired up in May. That includes courtship, copulation, nest scraping, and presumably egg laying. Yes an egg eventually was ‘found,’ likely by one of the wildlife officials or volunteer monitors (I was not there). It is not as though people were wandering around the beach and said “Hey, I think I see a plover egg over there!”
I will share that in the making of the 2021 documentary, “Monty and Rose 2: The World of Monty and Rose,” available on Vimeo, we literally did find two Piping Plover eggs, high on a sand dune in western Michigan. It was one of the more bizarre experiences during this entire plover saga of the past five years. We were walking the dunes in October, and two plover eggs—abandoned from the season before—were poking out of the sand. The discovery is shown in the opening of the film (have I mentioned it’s available on Vimeo?).
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