CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) — A yearslong recovery effort to help conserve the population of Great Lakes piping plovers reached an important milestone at Chicago’s Montrose Beach on Monday, after a new piping plover chick hatched on Sunday for the first time since 2021.
“The experiment worked,” wrote officials with the Chicago Park District.
The park district is among several regional agencies partnering with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Illinois Department of Natural Resources to help grow the population of Great Lakes piping plovers, which were listed as an endangered species in 1986. In 2023, conservationist teams brought several 5-week-old piping plover chicks to Montrose Beach in the hopes that they would return to the beach to nest.
This spring, one of those chicks — named Searocket — indeed returned. Officials said Searocket mated with piping plover Imani, who was born at Montrose Beach in 2021 to celebrity plover couple Monty and Rose.
Sunday’s hatchling will hopefully be the first of four new plover chicks, as there are still three unhatched eggs in Searocket and Imani’s nest.
It’s no guarantee that all four eggs will hatch a piping plover chick, though. A 2019 report from the Kellogg Biological Station Bird Sanctuary found that an average of 1.5 eggs successfully hatch from a four-egg clutch.
The Chicago Park District said it will continue to watch and protect the fenced area of Montrose Beach, recently named the “Monty and Rose Wildlife Habitat,” to keep predators from approaching the plovers. Officials have asked the public to respect closed area boundaries, keep dogs on their leash and take their trash with them whenever they leave the beach.
Efforts to turn part of Montrose Harbor into a habitat for piping plovers took off in 2019 after Monty and Rose became, at the time, the first plovers to nest in Chicago in 50 years. The two birds attracted major media attention and even prompted a planned beachfront music festival to be canceled due to its proximity to their nest.
Monty died in 2022 of a respiratory infection, and Rose has not been since.
Officials said they expect the next three eggs to hatch soon.
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