this just in (not good news) July 26, 2005
I hadn't seen Saturday's Boston Globe with this article about a woman and a teenage boy taking 4 piping plover chicks in Duxbury. When I went to work at my techie geek day job this morning (I was out yesterday), co-workers who know I'm a freak for piping plovers started asking me if I'd heard about the abduction in Duxbury. I feel sick. I also can't believe that with all those alleged witnesses nobody got a license plate number from their car or more of a description of the perpetrators. Anyway, if the crime took place on July 10, the chicks are dead now whether they were eaten or not. Like the Audubon guy quoted in the article, I don't think piping plovers are generally eaten in Brazil because they rarely migrate out of North America. I thought I might be mistaken about that, so did some we searching and discovered that there are records of piping plover occuring in Brazil in winter but they don't regularly migrate there. If the first scientifically confirmed records of piping plovers in Brazil are from 2000., I doubt that they are a traditional part of the Brazilian diet. The perpetrators were alleged to have been speaking Spanish, which means they're probably not Brazilian anyway. Last time I checked, they spoke Portuguese in Brazil. That people would snatch plover eggs in broad daylight from a fenced in area speaks to my argument that symbolic fencing is often not enough. I know there are a lot of birders and others out there who object to beach closure and point to Crane's Beach as the success story for symbolic fencing and predator exclosures without beach closure. However, in this particular case it seems to me if there had been a plover monitor of some kind on Duxbury Beach with a radio and access to local law enforcement authorities for back up, those chicks might well have lived or if not the perpetrators would at least have been prosecuted. OK, so maybe that doesn't justify beach closure either, but it surely justifies something more than symbolic fencing and predator exclosures. I don't know if Mass Audubon or the local authorities in Duxbury put Spanish or Portuguese signage on the symbolic fencing or if they assume everyone speaks English. Come to think of it, I am now extremely worried about our piping plovers at Parker River National Wildlife Refuge because we do not have Portuguese signage and the nearby town of Salisbury has a huge and growing Brazilian population. For that matter, not being standing on the beach this minute I can't remember whether we have signs in Spanish either. I know the informational brochure is only in English. I just had a frightening thought: Do they eat piping plovers in the Dominican Republic? OK, this is freaking me out more than the usual piping plover death story. I have nothing against Brazilians or Dominicans and I also assume their governments are signatories to the Migratory Bird Treaty.		Today's Reading The Grail Bird by Tim Gallagher This Year's Reading 2005 Booklist Today's Starting Pitcher Matt Clement
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