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The Bounce-Back: 2025 Snowy Plover Breeding Season Had a Tough Start But a Happy Ending

By Science Communication Specialist Jessica Weinberg McClosky, San Francisco Bay Area Inventory & Monitoring Network

Snowy plover chick with lots of downy feathers standing in some beach wrack next to a bigger, sleeker adult sitting in the sand. Behind them, a blue-green wave is starting to crest..
Snowy plover chick on Limantour Beach next to its watchful father. Biologists band most snowy plover chicks in Point Reyes immediately after they hatch to help keep track of them as they move around throughout their lives. But that only works if they can find the nest in advance, which is no easy task. With help from its parents, this unbanded chick eluded the monitoring team until it was already about three weeks old.

NPS / PRNSA / Aiko Goldston

November 2025 - Every year, federally threatened western snowy plovers—cute, well-camouflaged little shorebirds—breed on beaches and dunes in Point Reyes National Seashore. And every year, biologists and volunteers search for the birds’ nests, track chick survival, and help out where they can. Like many plover breeding seasons in Point Reyes, this one got off to a rough start. A day of high winds wiped out most of the early nests. But the plovers started over and bounced back. By the end of the season, the monitoring team had tallied the second highest number of plover fledglings (chicks old enough to fly) in over 30 years of monitoring.

The windstorm

The 2025 breeding season began on March 28, when the monitoring team found the first plover nest of the year in the Abbotts Lagoon coastal dune restoration area. They found many more nests throughout April, on Kehoe Beach, Limantour Spit, between Abbotts Lagoon and the North Beach parking lot, and in the restoration area. But on May 3rd, tragedy struck. A windstorm with gusts of around 60 miles per hour blew away or buried 12 of the 17 nests that were active at the time. In one bright spot from that episode, biologists found two abandoned eggs the next day buried in six inches of sand. They were able to rush the eggs, which were starting to hatch, to International Bird Rescue (IBR). Both survived and thrived in IBR’s care, along with another damaged egg rescued later in the season. All were released back into the park after they fledged.

Hands hold a plastic container full of sand and two speckled eggs. One of the eggs is broken in two beside a wet, just-hatched chick.
Chick hatching from one of two eggs en route to International Bird Rescue. Biologists found these eggs buried in six inches of sand after a severe windstorm in early May.

Point Blue Conservation Science / Carleton Eyster

Starting over

Plovers can nest multiple times in a season, and after the windstorm, many birds did just that. Some stayed with their previous mate, while others formed new partnerships. There were also new arrivals as the season progressed. For example, Point Reyes National Seashore Association (PRNSA) plover biologist Parker Kaye was excited to recognize two plovers nesting on Limantour Beach that he had previously monitored in the South Bay. It turned out that the female had already hatched a nest on a salt pond in Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge earlier in the season. This was just the second time the monitoring team documented a plover breeding on Point Reyes beaches shortly after nesting inland in the Bay Area.

The happy ending (with room for improvement)

All told, the team did over 200 surveys, including 15 volunteer-led surveys. They found at least 50 breeding plovers and 56 plover nests. That’s the highest nest count in the modern monitoring era! There are nest counts from the 1980s, though, that were higher.

Total number of snowy plover nests at Point Reyes, 1997-2025

Line graph of plover nest counts starting in 1997. Early on, counts fluctuate between the teens and mid-30s, reaching a low of 7 in 2012. After that, numbers bounce around in the 30s and 40s, reaching a high of 56 in 2025.
In 2025, the monitoring team found 56 plover nests, the highest count since annual monitoring began in 1997! It's not as high as several counts from the 1980s, however.

Biologists placed mini exclosures around 34 of the nests to help keep predators at bay. Artificially high numbers of common ravens, attracted by nearby human activities, have been a particular threat to the snowy plovers in Point Reyes. The exclosures definitely helped. Twenty-seven nests hatched a total of 64 eggs, with 62 percent hatch success for protected nests and 27 percent success for unprotected nests. Upon hatching, biologists were able to band many of the chicks. Banding helps with keeping track of the plovers’ survival and movements.

Adult plover with a back the color of sand, big black eyes, and a white breast sitting in a shallow depression between a piece of driftwood and a small lupine plant. We see her through a wire mesh exclosure that surrounds her. Its openings are big enough for plovers to come and go as they please, but too small for ravens and other predators to access the nest.
A female snowy plover incubating eggs next to a piece of driftwood and Tidestrom's lupine in a mini predator exclosure within the Abbotts Lagoon Restoration Area. These exclosures aid in keeping eggs out of reach from predators like common ravens or coyotes.

NPS / PRNSA / Parker Kaye

Two specked eggs and a tiny chick blending in well with their nest, a shallow depression in the sand lined with light-colored pebbles and shell fragments next to a pair of small sticks and a small plant.
One newly-hatched chick and two unhatched eggs in the restoration area near Abbotts Lagoon on May 2, 2025.

NPS / PRNSA / Parker Kaye

Small, downy white and tan/black specled plover chick held gently between a person's fingers. It sports tow colored bands on each leg.
A snowy plover chick banded red over violet on the left leg, red over aqua on the right leg (rv:ra). This bird was banded along with two other chicks at North Beach on July 24, 2025. The left leg combo (rv) is one of four left leg color combinations used to denote that this bird is from Point Reyes National Seashore.

NPS / PRNSA / Parker Kaye

Lau in sunglasses and a baseball cap smiling at the two tiny plover chicks that he's holding cupped in his hands.
Former San Francisco Bay Area Network plover biologist Matt Lau returned for a day of banding this season! Here he is holding two chicks at Kehoe Beach.

NPS / PRNSA / Parker Kaye

The monitoring team found their last fledglings of the season on Limantour Beach in early September. Out of the 64 chicks to hatch, at least 29 of them fledged. That's a lot! The only year the monitoring team counted more than that was last year, when they tallied 31 fledglings.

The percentage of chicks to fledge (46 percent) was also high compared to recent years. However, the preliminary estimate of overall reproductive success is a hair on the low side this year, at .96 fledged chicks per breeding male (plover dads are the ones that do the chick-rearing!). The target to sustain a population is 1.0. Last year, reproductive success was higher, at 1.29. But the Point Reyes snowy plover population still needs to grow a little more and meet the one-fledgling-per-male target for five years in a row to meet recovery criteria.

Winter flocks

With the breeding season over, Point Reyes beaches become home to some impressive winter flocks of snowy plovers. Plovers from outside of the park began arriving as early as July to settle in. Most of the newcomers lack bands and thus come from parts unknown. But when banded birds arrive, the monitoring team looks up where they came from and reports their current whereabouts. Some were banded in the South Bay or in Monterey. Others were from sites in Oregon. Remarkably, one bird seems to have come all the way from the Great Salt Lake area in Utah!

Point Reyes adults and fledglings often stick around and join these winter flocks, which can grow to reach triple-digit sizes.

Now the big question is, what will the next breeding season bring? Look out for a fresh round of Point Reyes snowy plover updates next spring!

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Last updated: December 18, 2025