SNPL 04

This is Violet-White-Yellow-Yellow, a female Snowy Plover that's been trying to nest for some time now.

The plovers in our region are collectively considered a "sink population," a concept in ecology wherein a population has negative growth (i.e. more deaths than births) so when individuals enter the population, they don't produce additional individuals and are in a sense "sucked away" from the species as a whole. This idea is coupled with the "source population," a group of individuals that is so reproductively successful, they produce an excess of individuals that disperse to other populations and boost their size. Our regional population suffers from an approximate 95% nest failure rate due almost entirely to raven predation--a sink population for sure!

And that's what has happened to this poofy lady--she keeps laying eggs and ravens keep eating them. I found her today on my survey of her beach, and she gave me a new experience in my plover work. She was gravid! That is, she had an egg in there. When a female is about to lay, the egg comes to rest right at her genital opening, causing her underside to droop like a goose butt. Females usually don't hold onto the egg for too long at this point, so she surely laid it by the time we had finished surveying. We'll have to cross our fingers yet again and hope for a miracle.