From a distance, you might have thought that this older gentleman on the beach had lost his way. 

As he wandered along the empty shoreline with tiny, tentative steps, you might even have speculated that he had lost his mind completely. His faint, atonal whistling certainly wouldn't have helped his case. 

But if you had cast your glance downward from his sinewy old-man's body to the sand around his gnarled feet, and if you had really looked hard, you might have seen what he had seen: a family of birds—two parents, four chicks—shuffling across the shore, plucking worms and beetles out of the wrack line left from high tide. And then, if you had the proper waterbird education, you would have realized he was actually in pretty good company. 

The L Street beach, a fenced-in, 150-yard segment of South Boston's beige, pebbly coastline, is not the flashiest of beaches. Managed by an old-school, bare-bones community center and reserved for men (particularly of the old and naked variety), it offers little more than coarse sand and historically polluted water to locals with no patience for travel or crowds. Then again, piping plovers, the species that chose to start a family on L Street in the summer of 2019, are not the flashiest of birds. No larger than a bread roll, they're the color of the sand in which they dwell, with a black band encircling their necks and another black streak tracing a stunted unibrow over their dark, inquisitive eyes. But once you spot one break free from its sandy camouflage by propelling itself on orange, twig-like legs toward the water's edge, its understated charisma hooks you.

"I was just charmed by it," said Kathy Parsons, a bird-loving conservation biologist, about her first encounter with a piping plover. This came in 1975, when Parsons was just a sophomore in college. She was collecting seagull feces from the Great Sippewissett Marsh in Falmouth, Massachusetts for a research project with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. "I could tell it was watching me. They just kind of watch you, and all of a sudden you're aware of them watching you with their plover eyes. It really stayed with me."

Parsons' kind eyes and warm smile beneath short, gray hair perhaps paint the stereotypical picture of a backyard birdwatcher, the type to spend weekday afternoons perched in front of a feeder, cooing at the warblers and finches and sparrows that have kept her company in the years since her own nest emptied. Yes, Parsons loves birds. But her decades-long career in conservation has kept her plenty busy, and far from her back porch. From 2011 until her retirement this winter, Parsons served as director of the Massachusetts Audubon Society's Coastal Waterbird Program (CWP), a conservation team committed to protecting the piping plover and other vulnerable shorebirds along the state coastline. It was through an internship with the CWP that I ended up spending my own sophomore summer seated beside the piping plovers of South Boston, the first to hatch within city limits in at least 30 years, if not a century and a half. And while I took the internship for the cute birds, I unwittingly stumbled upon a conservation success story that has more to do with the evolution of people than of plovers. As long as we enjoy warm sand and cool water on sweltering summer days, the threats to piping plovers will persist. But even if plovers will never be immune to the risk of extinction, the cooperation and commitment of the CWP, state agencies, beach managers, and beachgoing citizens have enabled a sustainable approach to conservation that will keep old men tweeting, young birders gawking, and piping plovers shuffling on Massachusetts beaches for years to come.

In the U.S. Northeast, piping plovers build their nests along the Atlantic coast, in sandy areas safe from the deluge of high tide. Following a single, thousand-mile flight each spring from the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, mating pairs get right to work, scouring the shore for a place to call home. For all this trouble, their nests are shockingly simple: a shallow, coaster-sized divot in the sand, tastefully decorated with pebbles and fragments of shell. In short order, four tiny, speckled eggs drop into the nest, commencing an incubation period in which the male and female alternate nest-warming duties. With any luck, four chicks—cotton balls with toothpick legs—enter the world one month later to reward their parents' diligence.

Starting a family right on the beach comes with obvious risks, none greater than home invaders. While gulls, rats, and raccoons are common predators of plover eggs and hatchlings, perhaps the gravest threat to young plover families is people. Beachgoers inadvertently trample the inconspicuous nests underfoot, run them over with ATVs, or unleash their dogs on helpless chicks, who see frollicking pups as nothing short of murderous beasts. Destruction of beach habitat for seaside development and sea level rise caused by climate change make family-raising all the more difficult. Together, these factors caused populations across the continent to plummet, and in 1986 the United States Fish and Wildlife Service listed the piping plover as threatened or endangered, depending on the population. That year, just 135 breeding pairs of piping plovers remained in Massachusetts. 

When the piping plover became listed, Mass Audubon rose to the task. The organization's history of bird advocacy, Parsons said, made it a "natural partner" of state and federal agencies in efforts to recover plover populations in the state. Boston socialites Harriet Hemenway and Minna B. Hall founded Mass Audubon in 1896 in protest against the decimation of bird populations for their feathers in the women's fashion industry. Among the species ultimately saved by their advocacy was the piping plover, whose entire Atlantic Coast population had been hunted nearly to extinction by the time the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) eradicated the feather trade in 1918. Piping plover populations rebounded to a peak in the 1940s, but the end of World War II put beachfront recreation and construction in high demand, initiating the plovers' more recent decline. Although Mass Audubon's original goal was realized with the passage of the MBTA, the organization never stopped pushing for bird conservation. In 1986, the same year that the piping plover was listed, the Coastal Waterbird Program began. 

Since then, piping plover populations have soared. About 800 pairs now grace Massachusetts beaches, a six-fold increase from their 1986 numbers. Over the same time span, the entire Atlantic Coast population has more than doubled, from 790 to 1,800 breeding pairs. This success has encouraged the plovers to spread into areas where they had never before nested, such as the L Street beach in South Boston in 2019 and Wollaston Beach in Quincy in 2020. The plover's prosperity in increasingly urbanized areas is an encouraging sign for conservationists who fear that a rising human population will put even more pressure on coastal waterbirds. Then again, the piping plover has never been accused of lacking resilience. 

But, like any conservation story, the success of piping plovers over the last 35 years has not come without a price, and the future of the species hinges on how we measure these costs of coexistence. Intensive management of the risks posed to nesting plovers has disgruntled many beachgoers and coastal property owners since the bird's listing. Though protecting the birds from human harassment, symbolic fencing around plover nests cordons off valuable sunbathing space on already crowded beaches. Restrictions on dog-walking and off-road driving only further ruffle the feathers of Massachusetts residents who waited alongside the plovers for the state's notoriously filthy coastline to be restored to good health. "The most important number on Boston Harbor is bacteria-free beach days, not plover eggs," Boston Globe columnist Lawrence Harmon wrote in 2014. 

Piping plovers are "exactly where everybody else wants to be," Parsons said, which makes their conservation a unique, and in some ways more difficult, challenge. For long-legged wading birds like herons, which Parsons studied for much of her career, simply preserving the secluded land where their colonies nest is often enough to bolster their populations. Meanwhile, piping plovers' heightened vulnerability in the thick of human activity renders them resource-needy "wards of the state." 

And even though the state piping plover population has skyrocketed since their listing, Parsons doesn't see an immediate future where fences and restrictions are gone from the beach. "If we didn't continue to protect the piping plover and manage the threats against them the way we have been, they would be in trouble again within 10 or 20 years," she said. It's the intensive management itself, rather than any intrinsic improvements in plover's ability to nest on the state's beaches, that has caused their numbers to rise so dramatically. Relax those conservation efforts, and the same threats that landed them on the endangered species list in the first place will wreak havoc once again. 

With piping plovers here to stay, and the public's temper running short, something had to give. Usually, human political will crushes the non-human population standing in its way. This time, something different happened. After generations of plovers adapting to life on crowded beaches, now it was the humans who evolved. As coexistence with plovers quietly became an accepted reality in Massachusetts coastal towns, complaints turned into offers of support. The Coastal Waterbird Program works with communities, beach managers, and coastal property owners to ensure they do not commit crimes under the state and federal endangered species acts. However, a long-term goal of the CWP, Parsons said, is to "graduate the monitoring and the protection of plovers to the local communities, so that it's really the people who are most connected with management of those beaches who are the most strongly invested in the success of the birds." The town of Sandwich, for example, now sets aside a portion of its own budget to hire seasonal shorebird monitors. 

Parsons hopes that this "grassroots" conservation strategy will give communities both the flexibility to host the birds their way and the pride to do it well. The public buy-in has landed piping plover conservation on solid ground. "The coastal communities of the state have come such a long way since the mid 1980s," Parsons said. "There's been an evolution of thought and acceptance over those decades. Now, we're in that kind of situation where we have so much backing and good will on the beach that it's not a disaster, it's not one of those things where everybody's working hard and putting a lot of money into saving them."

Sometime soon, this stability might allow Mass Audubon to direct more focus toward other critical bird populations. One example is the saltmarsh sparrow, a humble brown bird with an orange eyebrow and mustache. Large-scale habitat loss has state and federal agencies eyeing the species for listing. For now, though, Parsons is grateful for the communities that have made piping plover recovery possible, and eager for even more to come aboard.

"Because there are so many people on our temperate latitude beaches, they're part of the story, too," Parsons said. "They need to be recruited into the effort, and they need to push the message that the little birds on the beach, and all of the things that are part of the seashore experience, are worth protecting."

Some have taken this message to heart faster than others. On Nantasket Beach in Hull, six new pairs of piping plovers popped up in a five-year span. Instead of mourning the loss of beach space for its residents, the town partied. A shorebird celebration, featuring a large cake decorated with piping plovers, brought together town officials, residents, and Mass Audubon staff to mark the end of a successful breeding season. "There is that kind of response, at least in spirit, more times than you would necessarily expect," Parsons said.

Parsons is cautiously optimistic for the future of piping plovers on Massachusetts beaches. While they may never be fully in the clear, she is confident that the infrastructure is in place for conservation to be a lasting solution for both the birds and the communities that host them.

"There are success stories like the peregrine falcon, the bald eagle, and some others that have been able to go through the listing and recovery process and come out on the other end," Parsons noted. "I don't think the piping plover will ever do that because it ultimately profoundly relies on this active management. The thing that's remarkable about the piping plover is that this intensive management is something that's sustainable and acceptable and becomes a community effort.

Whether these exact management practices can be applied to other birds' conservation is unclear. Not many species establish themselves in such human-dominated settings as summertime beaches. Most of them stopped trying. But what is certain is that every species we've pushed to the brink of extinction will require our action to return from it. Conservation begins with our recognition of the value of coexistence and is sustained by our willingness to meet our earthly neighbors half-way. The success of the piping plover proves that a sustainable path forward for biodiversity isn't out of reach—all we have to do is care.

Without a doubt, emotions around piping plover management remain mixed. The same old man who paraded across the beach with the plover family by his side had earlier that summer angrily confronted me about the efficacy of the symbolic fencing around their nest. Petrified, I mumbled a couple of incoherent phrases before giving up and turning back toward the chicks. But I'd like to think that, by the end of the summer, his voice had softened up a little—at least when he spoke to the birds.