No sooner had I posted a thousand word monster about the recent, unbelievable 12th record nest in Barnegat Light when I got a txt from Kathy Clark: “Did you see the email from Rich Nichols about the piping plover nest he found at the Lighthouse?”
Oh crap. Rich is a great guy, a brother-in-lyme-disease, and one of NJ’s most experienced birders, photographers, and volunteers. If Rich says he just found a piping plover nest at the Lighthouse, far outside the safe bounds of Plover Park, well, that’s what happened. Rich both made my evening, and ruined it, at the same time.
So I threw my taco salad back in the fridge, grabbed a knife and a shovel, and drove just fast enough to not get pulled over to get to that nest before someone made a wedding proposal, took a family portrait, or did a cartwheel right on top of it.
Running out to the beach I was both surprised and relieved to find Jay Mann, editor of the greatest local paper on earth, The Sandpaper, and his wife Linda who works at the State Park, watching over that egg as if they’d just laid it themselves.
Just moments after arriving and getting the scoop from Jay, we noticed a pregnant woman, her husband, and their photographer were walking a straight path to crush the nest. There was no way they would have seen that tiny egg. Nobody would have. Except for Rich, of course! This thing wouldn’t have lasted 24 hours.
There was, conveniently, some old fencing from our first AMOY nest (see Evidence of Hatch) not too far away, but it was bulky and unwieldy.
Thankfully, Jay and Linda were happy to pitch in, ruin their night too, and help me drag a the fence across the park and rebuild it around the new nest.
.We were able to get a decent fence up before the sunset, and even before 8PM when Linda would have had to lock my car in the lot!
That should do it until, of course, NJFW gets up here tomorrow, looks at the absolute masterpiece Jay, Linda, and I constructed in a pinch, and starts making lots of edits.
Every time Elly & I have walked through this area this season, we’ve shuttered a little thinking that a bird might wind up nesting here. And now it happened. Only the unbanded male was at the nest, which is not unusual, and the female never showed up. What is unusual is how the male was incubating his one egg so decisively. While some younger, enthusiastic birds will do this, piping plover generally don’t incubate until they have laid all four eggs. If they don’t wait to incubate them all together, they won’t hatch all together, and that will be an enormous problem for them.
Perhaps he is incubating it because he’s already seen that if he does the normal thing for him to do (ignore the egg and hope no one sees it) that it will get trampled, almost immediately. Or maybe this is a pair who lost their first 3 eggs at Monmouth, or Island Beach, in the middle of laying, and fled here in a panic and dropped the last one: a phenomenon known as a continuation nest. This story is so hot, I haven’t even had a chance to check NestStory and see if this might be the case.
Or maybe he’s just really, really stoked.
Time will tell.
Normally I would be pretty horrified about the chances that this nest has a good outcome. But not tonight. I actually feel pretty hopeful. Because tonight I saw something you very, very rarely see doing this kind of work.
Instead of a careless, tuned-out, and sometimes hostile public, I was surrounded by smart, huge hearted, interesting people who love this Island, and its wildlife, and were willing to put their plans on hold for the evening to help a wild neighbor.
That’s all it takes for this nest to be a success. So that’s all it takes to end the extinction of the shore’s natural heritage.
And now I gotta go. I rushed this one to make sure I completely scooped Jay and The Sandpaper on this hot, breaking story!
Thank you for everything Rich, Jay, & Linda. You turned a rough situation into a lifetime memory of a perfect June evening down the shore.
And thank you to the mystery pair, for extending the absolute miracle that is Barnegat Light in 2026. If you are doing the math, we are now at an astounding 13 nests.
Say something kind