Occasionally I get confronted at Plover Park by a NIMBY (not-in-my-back-yard) local about the habitat restoration project in Barnegat Light. They usually ask briefly about the birds before launching into their main point of protest, phrased something like this:
I like animals and all, but why do you have to do this here? Why don’t you do this at Island Beach State Park or somewhere else?
~ Resident who doesn’t seem to notice, or mind, that they are being the very definition of a NIMBY
To which I usually give my favorite reply,
You’re right, that’s a great idea! We should do it there also.
~Northside Jim
And the truth is, we actually may need to do that sooner than later. Because Plover Park is now producing so many fledglings, who are so healthy that they are surviving their migrations and returning to breed, that we now need even more plover parks (plural), where they can nest!
For better or worse, in the meantime, Island Beach State Park has become a happy recipient of several of these newly created birds from Plover Park when they return to our region breed.
This all started several years back when one of the park’s earliest fledges, Suga, kicked it all off by surprising everyone and successfully nesting at Island Beach. Years later, Suga is the undisputed queen of Island Beach, and this trend only continues to grow and expand.
And now, in 2026, Island Beach State Park, just like Plover Park, is having a record season with a record number of nests while the rest of the state struggles. And it’s no coincidence that, in addition to another successful nest by Suga, three more of those record-setting nests were formed Plover Park offspring from 2025, Chunks, Zaddy, and Mandolorian. It’s unbelievable. This is the dream.
Unfortunately, Island Beach State Park as it exists today is not without its problems, starting with the fact that you can drive huge trucks on the beach there, and ending with the insane amount of fox, who are cruelly coddled and fed by some park visitors. Then throw in a gruesome number of plover-eating ghost crabs haunting its narrow beaches and you have a recipe for trouble, threatening to turn this dream into a nightmare.
But Island Beach State Park has two really big things going for it:
The first is the unwavering commitment of New Jersey Fish & Wildlife to the site. In fact, the first time I ever met my hero, my work mom, Kashi Davis, was in 2016 when she was willing to give me a tour of the restricted area of Island Beach, get the RFTNS treatment, and go “on the record” because she was so excited about the possible future of it. In 2016 they had the first piping plover nest there that they’d had in years. The public was super angry about the required temporary closure, but Kashi wasn’t backing down. She clearly saw that this was the beginning of something big and the decade since has certainly proved her prescient.
The second thing IBSP has going for it is, arguably, the most inspiring woman in all of New Jersey, Teri Bowers. Teri is the beach nesting volunteer in New Jersey. Sorry everybody else who might volunteer, but she beats me and she beats you too, if only for the sheer number of miles she has to walk, and the amount of blood she loses each week to flies, covering that enormous habitat. Only Holgate is as bad, and, oh, guess what? Teri volunteers there too!
People ask me all the time, “do you think any of the success of Plover Park can be attributed at all to your personal efforts there?” My answer is a firm, “probably not.” But if you ask me if the success of Island Beach of the last decade has anything to do with Teri’s tireless effort, my answer is “absolutely, 100%. There is no doubt.”
And so of course it was Teri who first noticed the weird dig marks around Chunks’ wire nest exclosure a few weeks ago, and NJWF confirmed this quickly after on their trail cameras. I got called in because this was Chunks. Son of Queen Charlotte, and one of Plover Park’s finest fledges. They wanted to know if I’d be willing to set up the same fox hazing system we use at Plover Park for Chunks up at Island Beach.
Are you kidding me? What really counts at Plover Park is not the park itself, but the animals we are creating and sending out into the world. That’s what this is all about; the recovery of the species.
So I dropped everything to get up there right away for our boy Chunks, for my good friend Teri, and for my heroes at NJFW who are so committed to these fragile birds in this oftentimes-nightmare habitat.
It was clear from the start this was not going to be easy. Most of the fox hazing techniques I try in Barnegat Light are meant to steer already-nervous predators away from sensitive areas before they even realize that they are sensitive areas in the first place. But here we had a fox who was already trying to dig around, and break into, Chunks’ wire exclosure. This animal was already “keyed-in” and determined. So the best hope was to throw the kitchen sink at the problem and potentially overwhelm the animal.
NJFW built a giant fence around the area of fladry: small waving flags used to deter animals from crossing. We added some flashers and strobes as well. And of course we added a full camera setup, using three live cameras, complete with spotlights, sirens, and two way audio.
And so began two weeks of absolute hell. Every night, an alarm would wake me up me each time the fox, who I stupidly named Meatball (see Meatball in Today’s Scary Morning Readings), would arrive and start terrorizing Chunks’ exclosure. I would then log on and begin the frustrating process of trying to spook, startle, and stop an animal who was completely obsessed with getting at the eggs.
But it was a great opportunity to learn. Having so much gear at one location, we were quickly able to determine that Chunks could detect Meatball almost 50 seconds before he arrived at the exclosure. This gave Chunks plenty of time to escape. We also learned that Chunks would return to the eggs within just a few minutes of Meatball leaving, suggesting that Chunks had a good understanding of what was happening, and a decent confidence in his ability to manage the threat.
So all that was left was to mess with Meatball in the middle of the night, every night. But this was a truly frustrating experience which left me feeling powerless and hopeless more often than not. Because no single thing really made the difference.
The fladry and the flashers did nothing… the wickedly determined Meatball walked through them the very first night.
The spotlights only got a quick glance from Meatball when they first turned on. The siren was pretty much the same.
Even yelling at him through the two-way audio, a technique that usually works quite well and I’m very confident in with most canines, was only enough to get him to pause; not to stop, and certainly not to flee.
But I did hit on two things Meatball really didn’t like. The first was when I panned the camera. Just the movement of the camera itself definitely made him back up and away from the exclosure. The second was howling like coyote. Having spent enough nights with Meatball, I was even able to try playing a variety of different coyote audio tracks, but soon discovered that my own “hooowwoooyyeee,” with my own voice, was equally effective! (I can only imagine what my neighbors thought was going on in my house in the middle of the night.)
But how effective were these few, small victories, really? When Meatball got hit with the coyote howl through a moving camera, he didn’t run… he backed away, sat down proudly, and stared into the camera; almost as if to say “Pfffpfpfpfff. I’m not afraid of that.”
Yet each time I hazed him like this, Meatball would give up for the night, slink away into the darkness and be gone, and Chunks would soon be back to incubating. That was the best we could do. Make messing with Chunks as unfun as possible. At least it was something.
While, in the end, we didn’t totally stop Meatball, what we were able to do was make it a whole lot less fun for him. He never cowered, he never startled, he never fled in a panic… but he did get sick of it and annoyed enough that he would leave and not return for the rest of the night. But he still returned every night, except for one, since the moment we started watching him.
Chunks and his mate survived all the way up to hatch day, and the exclosure was never breached. As the hazing got more fine tuned and we learned what makes Meatball tick, we were able to get him away from the exclosure quickly without interrupting incubation, or disturbing Chunks, too much.
But despite the success of this over-the-top effort to protect one of Plover Park’s own, there was a growing feeling of hopelessness as hatch day approached.
Meatball was stubbornly defiant about a small pile of eggs. What was going to happen when the tiny chicks began hatching, peeping, and squirming around? Would Chunks still be able to get out with a 40 second lead time when he was distracted by the hatching babies? Would he and his mate foolishly put themselves in harms way and sacrifice themselves trying to protect them?
It was two days before Chunks’ hatch and we were still brainstorming plans about what, if anything, we could do to help. It was 7:30 pm when I got a txt from Kashi Davis. She noticed that Chunks’ mate’s wing look a little odd on camera and wanted me to take a look.
Booting up the nest cam, I saw a wish come true, and total nightmare.
The first chick had hatched, two days early. Chunks’ mate was alone in the brutal wind tending to the nest. This meant the worst case scenario was happening: they would be stuck in the exclosure overnight for sure. And Meatball would be making his first, and probably final, appearance of the night in just a few hours.
Stay tuned.
Say something kind