Queen Charlotte and Just George (who we ‘ship as “Queen-George“) have just hatched all four of their eggs in Plover Park. As you’ll see though, one egg was a little late to hatch, so the chick is now about 12 hours younger than the other three. That’s an eternity in Plover Park time.
The video below will give you a taste of what it is like, every single day, monitoring the chicks. While the stress and drama are especially ramped up here because of how young and inexperienced these babies are, and the fact that dad is chained to that exclosure waiting for the youngest to get stronger, this is pretty much the game they’ll play for the next month.
I’ve always called the phenomena of the older chicks wandering off “going rogue.” This is a new view of it that we now have thanks to the Little Egg Foundation cams running in the park! Remember that piping plover are precocial, which means that, even at just a few hours old, they have to feed themselves. Mom & dad’s job is simply to try to stop them from wandering off and dying while doing so.
If you’re frustrated by the challenge of finding the tiny, inch-tall, fully camouflaged chicks scurrying around the beach in the blazing sun, and stressed out by how dicey it all is, welcome to the nightmare, and the joy, of every single person on the coast today who is walking around the beaches doing this exact same thing in an effort to track the fate of piping plovers.
And honestly, they are actually much easier to find and count in this video than they are in real life. You could never get this close without the adults flying into an even worse panic, and the chicks hiding in the nearest vegetation! This video is made 100% from a bunch of clips from the monitoring cams, while watching the hatch progress, in realtime, from miles away.
Good luck to you, and good luck to the Royal Family of Plover Park.
And if you ever want to help us with more cutting-edge endangered species monitoring, please support the Little Egg Foundation monitoring projects with a fully tax-deductible donation. As you can see, it helps us see more, respond faster, and disturb the birds less! A win, win, win for everyone; the plovers, the monitors, and for you too. We are expanding our monitoring beyond the nest and to the foraging areas, so we really, really need your help.
But right now, I just need your help finding these rogue babies from the Royal Brood of Queen Charlotte & Just George:
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