After being rescued as eggs three years ago from the banks of the flooding Missouri River, two artificially hatched and hand-reared piping plovers at Lincoln Park Zoo have themselves hatched the world’s first captive-bred chick of the endangered bird species.
Weighing in at less than half an ounce, a fuzzy, little piping plover chick almost literally jumped into this world running Saturday. Already it is paying dividends to federal officials, who asked the zoo to try to breed the birds as an experiment to learn more about the rare bird’s behaviors and life cycle.
“We’re seeing a lot of how the chick’s parents co-share duties in rearing the offspring,” said Kathy Brown, a supervisor at the zoo’s McCormick Bird House.
“Both the male and female took turns incubating the eggs after she laid them. Now that the one egg successfully hatched, the mother spends a lot of time brooding the chick, taking it under her wing to warm it up and provide security, while the father patrols the area defensively, keeping other birds away.”
Keepers and volunteers are spending much of the day taking careful notes on how the two bird parents are rearing the hatchling. Unable to ignore the alliterative possibilities of their work, they have taken to calling it the “Piping Plover Pilot Program.”
Whatever they find will enrich science’s very sparse record of a bird that was plentiful along Chicago’s lakeshore until it was nearly driven to extinction here decades ago by industrial, residential and recreational developments.
Fewer than 50 of the robin-sized birds are thought to be left in Illinois.
Only a few hundred mating pairs are left along the Missouri River in North and South Dakota, where 80 percent of their traditional habitat has been destroyed by hydroelectric dams.
In June 1995, flood control measures along the river meant temporarily raising water levels high above existing plover nesting areas. At the time, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees the river, called Lincoln Park and the Milwaukee Zoo, asking for help in rescuing eggs from known plover nesting sites.
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The two-day rescue operation netted 114 plover eggs. Federal officials kept 84 of them, incubating and raising the chicks until they were old enough to be returned to the riverbanks after the flood receded.
“They wanted us to hatch the eggs and start breeding the birds,” said Kevin Bell, zoo director at Lincoln Park. “Because of their endangered status, zoos hadn’t been allowed to keep them before.”
Of Lincoln Park’s 15 original rescued eggs, 13 hatched at the zoo, though four chicks soon died. The nine survivors were raised with sand-filled socks sporting little feather duster tails serving as surrogate parents.
As they matured, two of the birds were matched for mating and sent to the St. Louis Zoo. The rest stayed here, with keepers carefully choosing two breeding pairs, birds whose eggs had been taken from nests far removed from each other during the flood, assuring a good genetic mix.
Last year, both pairs, having reached sexual maturity, laid clutches of eggs, but only one egg was fertilized, and it never hatched. This year, each pair produced eggs again, including that of the newly hatched chick. Its sibling egg hatched, too, but the chick died within a day.
“Having a surviving chick this year kind of surprised me,” said Brown. “It’s never been done before in a zoo, so I wasn’t holding out high hopes of it happening.”
The successful mating pair is in a riverbank exhibit in the bird house, temporarily curtained off from public viewing because of the hatchling. They share the space with upland sandpipers, African pygmy geese and roseate spoonbills, all species considerably larger than the plovers.
“Being small doesn’t seem to bother the (plover) male,” said Brown. “He keeps chasing away any of the others that get too close to the chick, especially the sandpipers, who keep trying to horn in on the crickets, worms, maggots and grain we leave out for the chick to eat.”
The zookeepers have taken to calling the chick a “him,” though its gender has not been determined yet. That will come, Brown said, when it begins to grow feathers in a few weeks. Then keepers will obtain a feather sample and send it to a DNA specialist in Milwaukee who can determine the sex from the sample.
When they ranged along Lake Michigan’s shores, the piping plovers were fairly abundant in sand dune areas. As it happens, the zoo sits on land that once was a beach.
Old nature books refer to piping plovers as the “ghosts of the sandbars.” Their brown feathers blend perfectly with a sandy environment, making them difficult to spot, though their loud vocalizations of “peep-peep-peeplo” make them readily heard by beach and shoreline hikers.
Other zoos, including Milwaukee, are busy trying to get their piping plovers to breed. Lincoln Park, however, may beat them to the punch again, as it expects its second breeding pair, now incubating four eggs, to have hatchlings in another week or so.
Perhaps then Lincoln Park will be properly personified in posterity as the pioneer of prolific captive piping plover propagation projects.