Kouchibouguac National Park welcomed six pairs of piping plovers in 2024, which resulted in 16 fledglings — the highest annual production in seven years.
But it’s only a small stride in the fight to conserve the endangered species.
Piping plovers are migrating shorebirds that make their stop along the coastlines of eastern North America each spring to nest and raise their young before setting off on their journey south to Florida or the Caribbean.
The species is vulnerable to predation, flooding and human activity because the birds build their nests on exposed sandy beaches.
“It’s significant because we monitor the piping plovers’ reproductive success and 16 fledglings from six piping-plover couples amounts to 2.67 in terms of a fledgling rate,” Daniel Gallant, an ecologist for Parks Canada, said.
The national recovery strategy in Canada sets a production rate of 1.67 as the goal, “so we are well above the target.”
While the park has seen higher reproduction rates in the past, this is a sign of recovery following a crash that faced the species in 2019, when the park saw production rates as low as 0.5 per pair, Gallant said.
“This has been five years in the making.”
The piping plover population has been in decline in Canada since the 1980s and was declared an endangered species in 2001. But Daniel Gallant, a Parks Canada ecologist, is seeing signs of hope.
Prior to that crash, it was normal to have 10 to 12 nesting pairs each year, so “we haven’t recovered in terms of the number of pairs, so that’s quite worrisome,” he said.
This is the second time that 100 per cent of the nests at Kouchibouguac were successful at fledging at least one chick, Gallant said.
“The only other time this happened is 2003 and we’ve been following reproductive success since 1987.”
Sue Abbott, associate director of Atlantic programs for Birds Canada, said while those numbers are exciting to see, they don’t represent an uptick in the species’ overall population.
“The important message is that every beach is important, every pair is important when a species becomes a species at risk,” Abbott said.
Abbott, whose team monitors beaches south of Miramichi outside of Kouchibouguac, said only four piping-plover nesting pairs were spotted in that area last year.
“That was not a lot of pairs that we observed on those beaches, but the good news is they did well [and] produced a lot of young,” she said.
The population has been in decline since the 1980s and was declared an endangered species in Canada in 2001.
“Back in the ’80s, the alarm bells certainly went off,” she said, prompting Canada and the United States to implement recovery efforts for the species.
According to the Canadian Wildlife Service, the population in Atlantic Canada and Quebec between 2000 and 2016 varied — from a high of 272 pairs and a low of 174.
The federal government put in place a conservation framework for piping plovers through the Species at Risk Act in 2012, when strategies and goals were set for the species.
The long-term goal is to have 310 pairs of piping plovers regionally, with 105 of those in New Brunswick.
Abbott says Environment Canada, which collects data from conservation groups in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Quebec, identified roughly 190 piping plover pairs in the region in 2024, with only an estimated 40 pairs found in New Brunswick.
“New Brunswick has, unfortunately, been at the core of the population decline, which is really something we want to change,” said Abbott.
“It wasn’t long ago, in the early 2000s, that New Brunswick was the core home for piping plovers in the region… it supported the most breeding pairs of plovers than any other province in Atlantic Canada and Quebec,” she said.
Abbott said the greatest threats facing piping plovers are development of beaches, dogs being let off leash on beaches and recreational use of all-terrain vehicles and motorbikes.
“It continues to be a problem, including in New Brunswick, and there continue to be incidents where vehicles will crush eggs or even hit adults and chicks and kill them,” she said. “It’s pretty serious and we know ATVs and motorbikes are not good for the health of dunes.”
Gallant said, even if ATVs and motorbikes don’t crush the birds or their eggs, they still create tracks in the sand deep enough that it creates a barrier for chicks to reach their food source.
“[They] can do a lot of damage … before they can fly, fledglings need to walk to their food source,” he said.
Abbott said the most critical time for piping plovers in the province is from late April to July, when the birds touch down along the coastline of the province to nest and then raise their young.
