One of my favorite scenes from the past summer’s nesting season is this male Plover building a nest scrape.

The male lays on his breast, kicking sand backward to dig out a series of shallow scrapes. He’ll try to impress his mate by decorating their scrapes, tossing in tiny bits of seashells, pebbles, dried seaweed, whatever is readily available. In this case it was sticks, which was a first time for me seeing ‘stick decor.’ This little fellow and his mate valiantly tried numerous times to become established.

Sadly, while the Plover pair were attempting to nest, there were numerous disturbances from excessive drinking and partying on the beach, which leads to urinating in the their roped off areas. Not one, but two pairs, eventually gave up. Plovers giving up doesn’t happen very often. When they abandon their nests it points to one reason and one reason only. Disturbances. Happily though, our Super Mom and Super Dad were able to get an early start and successfully fledged two chicks.

Next year we have to work harder to find alternatives to massive underage drinking parties at Good Harbor Beach. The town of Dennis on Cape Cod has been experiencing similarly increasingly large and chaotic crowds and have taken action to reduce the underage drinking parties. Their solutions may not be our solutions, but I think we can do better to curtail the underage drinking at Good Harbor Beach. Not only will it help keep the teens safer and protect the Plovers, we won’t be stuck cleaning up the massive amounts of trash left behind that pollutes both our beach and dunes.

Good Harbor Beach after an underage drinking party