The first Piping Plover I ever saw was draped over my grandmother’s hat.
No. Not grandma Dunne. The other grandmother.
She was, in her youthful heart in the latter half of the 20th Century, still very much the proper, young Victorian Lady. Born into a Chicago Irish Family of standing. Groomed in Europe. Polished in an eastern finishing school. Dined with senators and presidents and confided with glee, that William Jennings Bryan was one of the most boring men she’d ever met.
Back to the plover. And why it was on a hat. And why it has bearing today.
From a conservation standpoint the Victorian Age was one of tasteless excess. I realize that such an assertion will be greeted with hand wringing in a town that genuflects before all things Victorian but it was nevertheless so. A sporting good time, in the mind of a proper Victorian gentleman, was slaughtering bison from the comfort of a Union-Pacific railroad car and keeping no more from the animals killed than a body count.
You had to have something to boast about in the dining car over your after dinner cigar and port.
Victorian women flaunted their environmental estrangement (or disdain) by adorning their headpieces with egret plumes - an affectation which led to the extirpation of herons and egrets up and down the Atlantic Seaboard. It didn’t stop with egrets. Colorful songbird species became something of the sequins and tinsel of that age.
I recall an account I once read by a bird watching Wall Street banker who conducted something of a “Big Day” one lunch hour. Strolling down the city streets he recorded the moribund forms of over 30 different species of birds adorning headpieces of the women he passed.
One of them could have been my grandmother.
Like Egrets (and Forster’s Terns and American Oystercatcher…) the Piping Plover was likewise extirpated (or perhaps, nearly so) from New Jersey’s beaches. Following the passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in 1918, a piece of legislation that afforded protection to most nongame bird species, the birds recovered somewhat but the recovery was tempered by (in the words of Witmer Stone who said this about the bird in 1937) “the constant annoyance of a throng of summer visitors…(and) the steady conversion of wild beaches into cottage colonies…(and) “the habits of visitors to the shore of running their dogs on the strand (beach).” Bird Studies at Old Cape May, Vol. I.
Today, the Piping Plover is a State (and Federal) Endangered Species. The bird doesn’t figure into women’s fashion any more (except as artwork on CMBO’s t-shirts) but it still suffers from many of the challenges described by Stone. In some shore communities it has become fashionable to take umbrage at the presence of this beach nesting bird and the cautionary measures that attend endangered species.
I once saw a bumper sticker on a vehicle bearing MG plates which read: “Piping Plover. The other white meat.”
The question today is the same that our Victorian ancestors faced and it is: how does our species choose to relate to all the other denizens of the planet? Does our species control the game or are we another player in the game? If we are in control, doesn’t that make us responsible? To what? To whom? To what end?
Anyway, the first Piping Plover I ever saw was draped, wings spread, across my Grandmother’s hat. They even got the color of the eyes right. Black. Made the bird look like it was almost alive.
I’m sure she never gave a thought to the steps that led to the bird being the centerpiece of her head piece or the efficacy or impact. For that matter, at the time of my discovery neither did I.
But I was only a child then. It’s perfectly excusable for children to be irresponsible.
Oh, by the way. Piping Plovers are back. It’s what I wanted to tell you when I started this article. I must have gotten carried away.