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As the first wave of fall migrants arrived on the North Carolina coast this month, ̽����ѡ biologists got a brief glimpse of a celebrity shorebird at Masonboro Inlet. Blaze, a hand-reared Piping Plover from Waukegan, Illinois on the shores of Lake Michigan, is back for the second year in a row at the inlet, which is monitored regularly by ̽����ѡ staff. 

Piping Plovers are tiny, weighing just as much as a few quarters, and their migration routes are long and perilous. For the people who raised and released Blaze on Lake Michigan, finding out that she successfully traveled halfway across the country to protected habitat in North Carolina was welcome news. 

“We were so excited to confirm with the North Carolina team that Blaze arrived safely at Masonboro Inlet,” said Carolyn Lueck, a plover monitor and Lake County ̽����ѡ Society board member. “The moment we confirmed her band, H4, we started cheering.” 

Piping Plovers are extremely small but feisty shorebirds that live along sandy beaches. They are federally threatened on the Atlantic coast but are classified as endangered in the Great Lakes region due to industrialization and development decreasing suitable habitat in the early 1900s.

Thanks to ̽����ѡ’s hemispheric monitoring efforts, we’ve been able to protect habitat and monitor Blaze and other Piping Plovers on both sides of their migration journeys. 

Long Journey

Blaze has already been through a lot as a one-year-old bird. In the spring of 2023, she was abandoned as an egg on the shores of New York and taken to the University of Michigan Biological Station, a captive rearing facility, where she was hatched and raised. Blaze and three other chicks were then released on the shores of Lake County—among the first hand-reared chicks to be released in Illinois from the station.  

In the fall of 2023, Blaze migrated to North Carolina, where our coastal team first spotted her in mid-September at Masonboro Inlet. She returned to Waukegan this spring and successfully raised three chicks with Pepper, another captive-reared bird released with Blaze in 2023. Now, she’s back in North Carolina for the winter. 

Lueck helps lead the Sharing our Shore program for in Illinois, which just celebrated a five-year partnership with the City of Waukegan to protect the habitats these birds rely on.

By collaborating with the city, they have been able to lead public education campaigns about the importance of sharing the shore, monitor hand-reared and re-introduced plover chicks on the shores of Lake Michigan, and have proven beyond a doubt the value of protected areas for birds and people.