When it rains, it pours — or rather, flutters.
Just two weeks after Chicago saw its first piping plover sightings of the season, another famed feathery visitor has made his local debut.
Pepper is back at Waukegan Beach. The piping plover, who has been a regular at the Lake County beach alongside his mate Blaze since 2023, was spotted over the weekend by a biologist with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, the Lake County Audubon Society announced in a news release.
The sighting follows the return of fellow seabird celebrities Pippin and Imani to Chicago’s Montrose Beach on April 13.
“We are incredibly excited to welcome Pepper back to Waukegan,” Lake County Audubon Society President Carolyn Lueck said in a statement. “This is a success story for our entire community.”
For years, local conservationists, including the Lake County Audubon Society, have been making a concerted push to bolster the once abundant but now endangered piping plover population across the Great Lakes shores and North Atlantic coast. The seabirds were decimated by habitat loss throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, leaving only about a dozen breeding pairs by the 1980s. However, thanks to efforts to reintroduce captive piping plovers into the wild and conserve their natural habitat, their local numbers have seen a resurgence.
As of last year, there were 88 breeding pairs across the Great Lakes region, local advocates say. Among those was Pepper and Blaze.
The captive-reared, federally endangered birds were released as chicks together in 2023 at Illinois Beach State Park in Zion.
Pepper’s journey to Illinois was a winding one. He had initially been part of a nest laid in Sandy Island Beach State Park in New York. But after one parent was killed by a merlin — a small falcon that lives throughout the Great Lakes region — the nest’s eggs were taken to the University of Michigan Biological Station in Pellston, where veterinarians hatched and reared the chicks, Pepper included. When he was just over a month old, Pepper, alongside Blaze and two other chicks, were taken to Zion.
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Pepper and Blaze have returned to Waukegan to nest every year since. They raised three chicks at the protected beach in 2024 and hatched three more last year.
Earlier this month, as Pippin and Imani descended onto Montrose, Lueck told the Tribune that Pepper and Blaze had been recently spotted at their wintering grounds in Florida and North Carolina, respectively.
With the return of Pepper, Lueck in her statement said, “We are so encouraged that (he) has survived another migration, one of the most challenging journeys in a bird’s life.”
Waukegan’s piping plovers nest is on a section of beach that isn’t open to the public due to longstanding site restrictions, the Lake County Audubon Society said. The restricted area is closely monitored through the season to ensure the birds’ safety. The Audubon Society on Monday said Blaze had not yet been sighted, but that volunteers would be continuing to scout for her in coming days.
Waukegan made the piping plover its official city bird in 2024.
The Chicago area has rallied around local piping plover sightings since 2019, ever since the beloved pair of Monty and Rose became the first piping plovers to live in Chicago in more than 70 years. After Monty’s death in 2022 and Rose’s disappearance the same year, attention turned to their son, Imani, who in recent years has regaled the city with hatchlings of his own with mate Searocket.
As of Thursday afternoon, Searocket had yet to reunite with Imani at Montrose, local volunteers confirmed to the Tribune. The hope, they said, is that she joins in on the excitement soon.