Yogi the Piping Plover at Cumberland Island by Dan Vickers

“You think YOU’RE a snowbird? Please.” – -Yogi the Great Lakes Piping Plover

Michigan in Pictures features almost exclusively photos from Michigan, but every so often there’s one that will have me reaching beyond our borders. Such is the case with this photo of Yogi the Piping Plover from Cumberland Island all the way down in Georgia that was recently shared by the Great Lakes Piping Plover Recovery Effort. Yogi hails from the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, but his preferred nesting site is the wild and busy Silver Lake State Park.

They explain that the Piping Plover is a small shorebird that is listed as an Endangered Species and nests in three separate geographic populations in the United States and Canada: The Northern Great Plains, the shores of the Great Lakes, and along the Atlantic coast. Birds from all three populations winter on the southern Atlantic and Gulf coasts in the United States & in the Caribbean.

Regarding the distinctive bands, they say: Great Lakes Piping Plover chicks are banded between five and sixteen days of age. Since shorebirds are precocial (Like chickens, Piping Plover chicks begin running around, feeding themselves within hours of hatching), these chicks have well developed legs, which makes it possible for us to band them with adult-sized bands at a young age. The bands we use are made of either plastic or aluminum, and they are very lightweight. Every sibling in a plover brood gets the same color and arrangement of three or four bands (depending on the band color-pattern used). This is called a “brood-marker combination”. There aren’t enough possible combinations available to give every chick their own unique identifier from hatching, but by giving the chicks from the same family, or brood, the same combination we can study such things as parental success, fledging rates, and return success.

Here’s a few more Piping Plover pics – visit greatlakespipingplover.org for more and to help support their work!