Huntington Town closes off Hobart Beach preserve to protect endangered birds

Spring arrives Saturday, and so may the piping plovers, the tiny sand-colored birds that weigh about as much as two envelopes but whose chicks may forage 3,000 feet from their nests on open beaches.

Volunteers joined Huntington Town officials Wednesday to fence off Hobart Beach's Sarah H. Rupert Water Bird Park Preserve, a narrow peninsula on the North Shore that extends south into Huntington Bay and is home to the endangered plovers and other birds.

The plovers’ small stature — they may only stand five inches — and the way the chicks must find food, such as worms and insects, as soon as they hatch but before they can fly, make them tough to protect, according to scientists.

Further, a piping plover’s nest is almost impossible to spot. "It just looks like tiny rocks, it blends right in," Steve Sinkevich, a senior biologist at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said by telephone.

In addition, the shorelines they nest on from April to August or so are great places for people to walk, swim from or build on. These are the main reasons the numbers of Atlantic coast piping plovers plunged to just 790 breeding pairs by 1986, according to scientists.

"We’re causing a lot of this decline … since we caused it, we can resolve it and try to protect this species," said Sinkevich. "When we educate people, a lot of people will respect the signs and the string, but you’ll always get some who don’t," he added.

Huntington Town Supervisor Chad Lupinacci outlined another problem: "Many patrons leave behind garbage that attracts predators."

Gulls, foxes, and raccoons all see plovers as prey.

At the preserve, workers placed "symbolic" fencing — strings tied between fence posts with orange flags — around the preserve, and extended snow fencing into the water, to discourage anyone from walking around the barriers. The fences, which also aim to ward off boaters from landing, also protect other birds, including the common and least terns, and oystercatchers.

Even a person "staying too long in the vicinity" can cause piping plovers to never return to their nests, said Lupinacci .

And piping plovers often are mistaken for a less imperiled bird, the sanderling, the biologist said.

"People will think they are plovers, and they think ‘Well, there are so many there,’ so they disregard the fencing," he added.

"Even well-behaved dogs frighten plovers and other shorebirds" that then abandon their young, the Town of Huntington said in a statement. The town noted it bars dogs, whether leashed or not, from all town beaches except for paved areas and boardwalks.

Plovers typically return from wintering down South to where they hatched; Long Island drew about 400 pairs last year, down from 440 in 2019, according to preliminary data, said Sinkevich. The birds favor many popular local beaches: the Rockaways, Long Beach, the state parks of Jones Beach in Wantagh and Robert Moses in Babylon, the Peconic Bays, and the Fire Island National Seashore.

The preserve last year had six pairs of piping plovers; it usually gets four to eight, said Sinkevich.

Lupinacci said anyone who spots trespassers in the preserve should alert the authorities by calling: 631-351-3255.