The story of the hooded plover is actually a story about people, Port Fairy author Jock Serong says.
There are the people who are aware of the plovers and keep away and the people who don’t care and let their dogs run wild on the beaches, then there are the Plover People, as Jock describes them. The Plover People are a passionate band of conservationists trying to not just protect the hooded plovers from people – but the plovers from themselves.
“In the early 90s I was a national park ranger and I used to have to deal with the plover people a lot,” Jock says. “They drive around in hatchbacks with wooden stakes in the back.”
Despite sounding vaguely vampiric, the stakes are for marking where the plovers breed and to warn people to stay away.
“Based on the sheer amount of stakes and strings and signs there must be a lot of plover people patrolling Victorian beaches,” Serong says.
The numbers aren’t actually large, but the volunteers are hard-working and passionate.
Rosemary is one such plover person. She sets up enclosures on the beaches east of Melbourne during breeding season which lasts from November until March.
“They (the plovers) need to be able to see – so you put four poles and a piece of rope and you just alert people that they are there,” Ro says.
Plover people also put up signs along the beach letting people know that plovers are nesting nearby.
“They are a threatened species because their numbers are declining rapidly,” Ro says.
The hooded plover inhabits beaches from South Australia up to southern NSW as well as in Tasmania and between Esperance and Perth in south-west Western Australia. The birds spend their lives on the beach and have to face off many predators. There are feral cats and foxes, dogs, rising sea levels, and people walking on the beach.
They are also not as beloved as more suburban birds such as the magpie or as colourful as the lorikeet or galah. Sadly, the plover went home on day three of this year’s poll.
But those that like the plovers are passionate about the little birds.
“They have very shallow little nests – little scrapes in the sand. It’s easy to trample on them if you don’t know they are there and nesting season is over the peak period of summer.”
The plovers lay around three times a year – and the problem – apart from the relative openness of their nests – is that they ward off predators by trying to distract them by walking in front of them. This means they leave the nest, causing the chicks to freeze or starve.
“If they see a dog – they’ll get up off the nest and try to distract the dog – and then when they do that, the eggs will cool. There are a lot of factors that make life difficult for them,” says Ro.
Serong argues that even with the help of the “plover army … they have an evolutionary strategy that clashes badly with people. There’s a whole heap of birds you can go into bat for – but these are the most exposed of the lot. They hatch a bird in the open and if they (dogs, people, cars) go anywhere near the egg then its game over – even if your dog is a so-called ‘good dog’.”
But what about the enclosures?
“It’s a wild animal and you’ll see plovers not getting with the program and wandering outside their enclosure. I really am on the sides of the plovers,” Jock stresses. “But it’s one of those instances where they are not helping themselves.”
Hooded plovers breed along the beaches of Port Fairy on the south-west coast of Victoria where Jock surfs.
“We’ve got dogs but we don’t take dogs to the beach in that old surfing tradition – because they can be incredibly damaging on beaches, particularly with hooded plover nests.”
Plover people try to educate dog owners about breeding season – “You have a ‘dog’s breakfast’,” says Ro. “Dog owners are invited to come along with their dogs for a sausage sizzle and we explain why dogs can’t run on the beach.”
Most dog owners are receptive but “some people don’t like being told what to do.”
Stephen Johnson has been helping hooded plovers for 15 years, and heads up a Friends of the hooded plover group on 42km of coastline around Inverloch.
“In the 15-plus years of helping the plover – we’ve managed to halt the rapid decline and got it to plateau out a bit,” says Johnson.
“Getting the breeding numbers to go back up again is the difficult part because their beaches are getting more and more heavily visited – all year around. The Victorian coastline is getting really busy – with the increased beach numbers you get dogs and extra activities – kite flying, paragliding, electric bikes on beaches – they just keep coming – the threats. They lose a percentage of their eggs through ravens, foxes and cats and the tides but a good percentage is human disturbance – getting too close chicks.
“There’s a lot of support for what we are doing – but our volunteer numbers could improve. We have around 15 active volunteers.”
Johnson bristles slightly at the suggestion that the hooded plovers’ biggest enemy is itself.
“They have been around since the Jurassic age. I get frustrated when people say “they are silly little birds, why don’t they go and nest in a tree?” They don’t get it, the real efforts these birds put in to survive.
These birds never leave the beach – they are born and live and die on the beach. At 100 grams – the birds spend all their lives in all sorts of weather and storms.”
They struggle and they need help, says Johnson. “We are not asking too much. We just want to share the beach, we just want them to survive.”
