If I were to rank my days on the job at BiodiversityWorks from best to worst, May 23, 2025 would be near the bottom. Until that point, the 2025 beach-nesting bird breeding season had been off to a promising start. We were discovering new nests of piping plover, least tern, and American oystercatcher pairs every day. Predation rates were low. Three of our busiest sites already hosted more nesting pairs than they ever had before. But then a powerful nor’easter rocked the island during the night of May 22nd. Wind-driven tides from this storm completely overwashed all of our sites with east-facing beaches. The next morning, we found an American oystercatcher nest, two least tern colonies, and 14 piping plover nests all lost to the storm — almost a third of our monitored nests at that point.
All of a sudden, a promising season looked like a disaster. However, the birds reminded us that this is not the first storm they have faced in their evolutionary history. They regrouped after losing their initial nests and, like clockwork, one week after the storm, began re-nesting at these overwashed sites.
It would not be just a simple matter of laying more eggs, however. The pairs that renested after the storm faced a slew of heightened risks stemming from the late start. Rather than hatching over the course of weeks in late May, these re-nests would all hatch in a span of just a few days around the 4th of July, when human activity on island beaches ramps up to its busiest. The adult birds would have to protect their nests and chicks from predators for another month, with those predators searching ardently for food to feed their own fast-growing young. The parents would have to find areas to feed and shelter their chicks among fierce intra- and inter-species competition from all the other pairs hatching their chicks at the same time. Then all the pairs that managed to navigate those challenges would have to prepare for migration on an accelerated timeline.
Fast forward to now, two months removed from the nor’easter, and I find myself amazed at the resilience and adaptability of these beach-nesting birds. To be sure, not all of the re-nesting pairs met the challenges listed in the previous paragraph, and when all is said and done, the storm of May 22nd will still be remembered as a major setback in the 2025 nesting season. But far more pairs managed to clear this hurdle than I would have expected. These tough little birds salvaged a respectable season.
This episode highlights several important points about beach bird breeding biology. One point is certainly the extreme volatility, both for good and for ill, of coastal bird reproduction. Bad luck can ruin a season in just a few hours, just as apparent disasters can morph back into success. But even more important is a larger lesson: these are long-lived birds highly evolved for life in a dynamic environment, and even an entire season’s final productivity constitutes just one point of data in a perpetual struggle. An unproductive year, or even worse, a series of them, may be profoundly discouraging. But a single good year can put a breeding population back on track. Indeed, for many of these species, long-term success can depend more on occasional big years than on steady, moderate productivity. Managing these birds demands a long-term perspective, because in the short term, the only certainty is uncertainty.
Below is an up-to-date summary of the beach-nesting bird productivity on beaches we’ve monitored this season on the island of Martha’s Vineyard.
| Species | Pairs | Nests | Nests Hatched | Unfledged Chicks | Fledglings | Current Productivity (fledge/pair) | Maximum Productivity (fledge/pair) |
| PIPL | 60 | 98 | 29 | 32 | 18 | 0.30 | 0.83 |
| AMOY | 20 | 24 | 16 | 7 | 15 | 0.75 | 1.10 |
| Species | Colonies | # of colonies with no productivity | # of colonies with poor productivity | # of colonies with fair/good productivity |
| LETE | 6 | 4 | 1 | 1 |
