The Bird That Nests on the Beach — a stop on M-22.
If you stop at a beach along here — and you should — you may find part of it roped off with string and small signs. Don't step over it, and here's why, because it's one of the genuine conservation stories of this coast.
The Great Lakes piping plover is a small, pale, sand-colored shorebird that nests on exactly the kind of wide open beach that people also love. It doesn't build much of a nest — just a scrape in the sand with a few pebbles, and eggs so perfectly camouflaged that you would step on them without ever seeing them.
By the mid-nineteen-eighties there were somewhere between twelve and twenty pairs left in the entire Great Lakes basin. Twelve pairs. The whole population was one bad season from ending.
What brought them back is not glamorous: volunteers standing on beaches all summer, wire cages over nests to keep out gulls and foxes, roped-off areas, and a captive-rearing program that hatches abandoned eggs and releases the chicks. The population has climbed back into the seventies of pairs — still perilously small, but it is several times what it was.
So: keep dogs leashed on these beaches, walk on the wet sand near the water rather than up in the dry stuff, and stay outside the string. You're not being managed for no reason — you're standing in the nursery of a bird that very nearly didn't make it.