Wisconsin News

Endangered piping plovers are rebounding in Green Bay thanks to local conservation efforts

August 3, 2026

This is the 10th year of the rare birds nesting on the restored Cat Island after more than 75 years of absence

Green Bay has a new comeback kid: the piping plover.

Piping plovers are small shorebirds that breed and nest on sandy beaches around North America. They are among the rarest birds in the country.

The Great Lakes used to be home to more than 800 pairs of these plovers, but the population dwindled as beach development and shoreline erosion disturbed their habitat. The species was listed as endangered in 1985, when only about a dozen pairs remained in the Great Lakes region.

But the local population has been rebounding due in part to conservation efforts led by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services and with support of local birding groups. This spring, the Great Lakes piping plovers returned to Cat Island, located just off the shore of the city of Green Bay, for their 10th straight nesting year.

“In the last decade, we’ve had an average of about four pairs out there every year,” Tom Prestby, the Wisconsin conservation manager for Audubon Great Lakes, told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today.” “And then every year they’ve fledged at least some chicks successfully.”

Back in the summer of 2015, Prestby and a few of his colleagues from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay saw a pair of piping plovers on Cat Island while out collecting data for a thesis project.

“We were optimistic maybe they’d come back the next year because plovers need undisturbed Great Lakes beaches, and that’s exactly what we had out there all of a sudden,” Prestby said. “Lo and behold, in 2016, we saw a male and then a female in May.”

While monitoring the birds one evening that spring, Prestby noticed the female seemed to be “up to something.” He used his camera to zoom in and saw she was sitting on eggs she had laid in the sand.

“That was the first breeding occurrence on record in Brown County, and the first breeding occurrence anywhere on the bay in 75 years,” he said. “In the 10 years since, they’ve been breeding every single year.”

To keep an eye on the growing plover population, Prestby oversees a group of volunteers who take shifts going out to Cat Island to observe the birds. The volunteer monitors range from UW-Green Bay students and Department of Natural Resources staff to members of the Northeast Wisconsin Bird Alliance and retired birders eager to see the rare plovers in action.

“We have monitors out there every single day, usually for about a couple hours at a time, sometimes multiple times per day,” Prestby said. “The monitors go out and count the birds they see. They look for documentation of pairing behavior, courtship behavior, nesting, and then later in the summer, the most important thing is counting the number of chicks.”

In recent years, the plovers on Cat Island have fledged an average of seven chicks successfully, meaning they survive until they are old enough to fly. Jade Arneson, a biologist with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service in Green Bay, said volunteer monitoring efforts have been crucial to helping chicks survive the season.

Sometimes that looks like chasing away a predator. Once, a volunteer scared off a peregrine falcon in search of its next meal. One year there was a plover chick that got a large burr stuck to the bottom of its foot. A volunteer monitor noticed and alerted Arneson’s office, allowing them to safely catch the chick and remove the burr.

“That bird likely wouldn’t have survived without that intervention,” Arneson told WPR.

The return of the piping plover is a conservation success story. The piping plover is considered an “indicator species,” meaning when the plovers are thriving, it’s good for the whole Great Lakes ecosystem.

Arneson is involved in the agency’s recovery plan for the piping plover. One of the overarching goals is to see 150 pairs of piping plovers across the Great Lakes region, with at least 50 of those pairs occurring outside of Michigan, the current piping plover stronghold. This year, the regional pair count is at 98, the highest on record in decades.

“We also want to see habitat for the species continue to be protected and restored, as well as new habitat created,” Arneson said, “because we recognize that’s a very important piece to the success of these birds.”

A major driver of the piping plovers’ return to Green Bay is the Cat Island Restoration Project, which involves reconstructing three barrier islands that eroded in the 1970s after severe storms swept through the area. The sandy beaches where the piping plovers have returned started being rebuilt in 2012 using repurposed sand dredged from the outer harbor channel.

“The plovers basically found their habitat as soon as it existed again,” Prestby said.

The restoration project is considered exemplary in the Midwest. Arneson told WPR she recently hosted a visitor from Ohio who wanted to see the success of the project up close.

“There’s no other project that’s anything like this in scale or scope on the Great Lakes,” Arneson said. “Cat Island is held up as the big example of what could be possible. It’s a unique project here in our own backyard.”

As for the piping plovers, now that they have spent a nesting season in the Great Lakes, they will soon be heading south to warmer climes.

“Our birds that breed up here in Green Bay and across the Great Lakes region are spending their winters along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts,” Arneson said. “We have them up here for a few short months, and then our southern neighbors get to enjoy them much longer.”