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Save Chicago’s Piping Plovers. It’s Good for Humanity.
It is possible that you don’t know this, but Chicago is a mecca for seeing birds. I think that is what should be on the poster for Chicago: the amazing bird population; the migratory bird vacation destination that is Montrose Park Conservatory (wonderfully nick-named “The Magic Hedge”); or one of the handful of whip-smart ornithologists who work at the Field Museum and are basically solving the end of the world one feather at a time. Chicago has a lot of things going for it, but one of the greatest is that there is no part of the city — north, south, east, or west — where there isn’t a next-level bird-watching place.
And I didn’t mean to make this entire blog post about the plovers, but when I started writing about them, I couldn’t stop. It was going to be something much less specific, but the plovers are everything right now. And so this post will cover plovers, and that’s it. (Wasn’t that a great rhyme? That’s the reason I wrote it.)
Maybe you’re like, “What plovers? What is a plover? Why do I care about these plovers?” OK, yes, calm down. Right now, there is a breeding pair of piping plovers on Montrose Beach. This is a big deal. There are only 70 breeding pairs of Great Lakes piping plovers left. Piping plovers are cuter than you are imagining them to be: they’re kind of the definition of what the term “charismatic…
