Sarah Foote prepares a meal of black worms and tiny crickets for the endangered piping plovers she’s helping to rear—white, fluffy birds constantly on the move.
Sarah Foote prepares a meal of black worms and tiny crickets for the endangered piping plovers she’s helping to rear—white, fluffy birds constantly on the move.
Feeding time comes every three hours from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. for the smallest chicks at the Piping Plover Captive Rearing Center and it takes a team to do it. Foote, animal program manager at Potter Park Zoo in Lansing, has visited the University of Michigan Biological Station for 15 summers as part of the team effort to rejuvenate the Great Lakes shorebird population after near extinction in the 1980s.
This summer, they counted a record 88 unique nesting pairs—more than halfway to the goal of 150 pairs. The shores of the Great Lakes were once home to nearly 800 pairs of piping plovers. In 1990, that number had dropped to between 12 and 17, only in the state of Michigan on two of the Great Lakes.
Read More at: University of Michigan
The smallest piping plovers await a meal of black worms and small crickets. (Photo Credit: Jeremy Marble, University of Michigan News)