Parenting is no joke for our local western snowy plovers. First there’s finding real estate on the San Francisco Bay—somewhere salty, flat, and undisturbed in which to dig a slight scrape for a clutch of two to six inch-long eggs. Development, introduced beachgrass, and other human disturbance make likely spots scarce.
Fewer than a third of the eggs hatch. The chicks that do emerge must move far and fast, even in their first hours. Parents show their thumb-size, flightless offspring where to feed and help distract predators, but getting food is on the chicks. After six days, the mother abdicates parental responsibility to the father and leaves to start her next brood. So few chicks make it, she’s hedging her bets.
And yet our local plover population has hit a winning streak, ticking up almost every year since 2020, according to a new report from the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory (SFBBO). It’s part of a broader success across the whole Pacific coast population, a federally threatened bird whose breeding habitat ranges from Baja California to the state of Washington. “Although several recovery criteria still need to be met, the overall trajectory indicates that the plover is making strong, steady progress toward recovery,” Nora Parapian, deputy field supervisor for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, wrote in an emailed statement.
Last year, researchers counted a record 383 fledged adult birds in the San Francisco Bay—a long way from the low of 72 birds documented in 2003, and about three-quarters of the way to the 500 adults needed for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to declare the population recovered. “We still have a long way to go,” says Maddy Schwarz, the science director at SFBBO. But she’s optimistic. “Things are looking good for the plovers.” In the Bay, where many other birds are struggling, plovers have succeeded by nesting at the former salt ponds that form iridescent blocks along the Bay. There are now more plovers in the Bay than anywhere else in the region.
But there’s a catch: people—conservationists, in fact—are shrinking the good plover habitat. Before European settlers began reshaping the bay, most plovers likely stuck to nesting on West Coast beaches, like at Point Reyes. But as development claimed shorelines, some plucky plovers landed on the next best thing: the dry salt ponds along the San Francisco Bay, where industrial salt production had created a briny world that could be a beach, if you held your nose. Plovers set up shop. In the past century, those salt ponds raised 10 percent of the Pacific coast population of western snowy plovers. Fish and Wildlife designated the Bay and its industrial salt ponds a key area in the species’ recovery.
But over the past two decades, the South Bay Salt Pond Project has breached the dikes of those decommissioned salt ponds one by one, allowing the sea to pour in and turn them back into the salt marshes those salt ponds had once replaced. It’s the largest tidal restoration project on the West Coast. About 95 percent—190,000 acres—of salt marshes in the Bay had been destroyed by the 1990s. So far, the project has brought back about 3,000 acres; another 4,500 acres of restoration are planned.
Each new marsh is one more place an endangered Ridgway’s rail can forage, or an endangered salt marsh harvest mouse can scurry—and one less place a plover can breed. So the growing population of plovers is crowding onto fewer salt ponds. “It’s a matter of having conversations on how to parcel out the acreage,” says Carleton Eyster, avian ecologist with Point Blue Conservation Science, the Petaluma-based nonprofit that monitors plovers in the North Bay and Point Reyes. But this has resulted in a “very complicated balancing act,” as Dave Halsing, the salt pond restoration’s director, puts it. As restoration plans to flood two current breeding ponds, a third pond will be kept dry, and have its plover nesting habitat improved. “There’s all sorts of silly puns to be made about putting all your eggs in one basket, but it actually is like that,” says Halsing.
Katie Smith, a salt marsh harvest mouse expert, says long-term, making sure there’s plover habitat alongside salt marsh could benefit all species, as sea levels reshape coastal areas in unpredictable ways. “Higher diversity [of restoration] may provide greater resilience,” she wrote in a message to Bay Nature.
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And the plovers haven’t seemed to mind the closer quarters so far, which perplexes Schwarz. “That’s one of the most frustrating things about having this job,” she says. “When something goes wrong, it’s really hard to tell what is going wrong. And when something is going right, it’s really hard to tell what’s going right.” Maybe what’s made a difference is the work Schwarz and her colleagues have done to give the plovers the best shot they can: spreading oyster shells to help plovers camouflage, digging channels so nests don’t flood, and working with state and federal agencies to kill the predators, like ravens, who love a plover snack. Land managers at places like Don Edwards Wildlife Refuge also control water levels to ensure plovers have the best shot at nesting (though layoffs of local national wildlife refuge staff at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service may imperil that work).
But it’s also possible, Schwarz speculates, that living closer together helps plovers somehow, like by making it easier to warn each other about predators. Or that more plovers make an easier target. Schwarz is working with a master’s student from San Jose State University, who hopes to untangle how closer quarters impact plover survival, and maybe help her figure out what plovers need next.
After 30 years studying them, Eyster says not to underestimate the birds: “They have an indomitable spirit,” he says. Schwarz has begun crisscrossing the South Bay again to conduct the 2026 plover count, and she feels good about this year, too. She’s already finding “lots of nests in lots of places.” “It’s just going to get crazier from here on out,” she says.
