For the bulk of his career, more than twenty years, my father was Nantucket Island’s sole Audubon employee. As Sanctuary Director, he lived year-round on seventy acres of conserved Audubon land, in Audubon housing, surrounded by pitch pine forest, meadow, and a scrub oak savannah that ran along Hummock Pond, in the center of the island. It was a place called Lost Farm.
For two of those summers, while in college at the University of Oklahoma, I worked on Nantucket as a shorebird intern, monitoring nesting populations of piping plovers and least terns along Squam and Quidnet beaches and around Sesachacha Pond. My ensemble those summers—hat, sunglasses, binoculars, Rite-in-the-rain notebook, and stack of Coastal Waterbird Program log-sheets—was reminiscent of my elementary school wish to become Harriet the Spy, and was not so different from the magnifying glass, spiral notebook, and mirror-equipped sunglasses I then had carefully organized in my faux-leather fanny pack, longing to stumble upon a mystery.
As Shorebird Intern, I learned to identify tracks in the sand: plover, tern, seagull, crow, sandpiper, feral cat, rat. My job was to know where the tern and plover nests were so that I could put up fencing and signs, eventually count and record the number of eggs in each nest, and then know how many eggs hatched, how many chicks fledged. All of this would join data being collected across the state, ultimately across the country, as conservation groups worked to bolster declining populations of shorebirds.
While the least terns nested in large and noisy colonies that were all too easy to spot, even for a novice like me, the piping plovers nested only in quiet, solitary pairs.
Piping plovers are camouflaged little birds, the size of a crumpled tissue. They have a black ring around their necks and are otherwise the color of shifting sand: gray, white, and beige, with an orange beak dipped in black ink. They move over the sand in quick, silent steps and less often fly in those weeks of feeding and nesting, their wings then forming a neatly drawn, stretched-out “M” across a tiny pocket of sky.
They’ve adapted to hide their nests in plain sight: digging shallow holes—“scrapes”—in the open sand, often at the edge of a dune. Here they sit quietly upon speckled eggs, females and males taking turns incubating for 4 weeks.
Egg-loving predators abound. On Nantucket, an island 25 miles out to sea and thus still uninhabited by the likes of racoons and skunks, the list of threats nonetheless remains daunting: crows (who, I was told, were smart enough to follow my footprints, were I to walk too close to a plover nest, and thereby claim their treasure), seagulls, feral cats, rats.
But the plovers bet on their ability to be silent and still, patient and invisible.
Silence and stillness, patience and invisibility became my tools, too, in figuring out where their nests were. Early in the season, I would hear the single-note piping call, or spot a plover feeding along the tide line, and then lay belly down on the sand a dozen yards away, binoculars to my eyes, watching where she went. Eventually, she might climb up onto dry sand, pause, being to scrape. Maybe this scrape would be the one in which she chose to lay her eggs. But whether this would happen that day, or the next week, I did not know. I could only sit and watch.
It was the first time I paid close attention, for any extended period of time, to a bird.
I would follow the tracks of their winding feet. Scan the beach, dune to tide line. When I couldn’t see them, I’d often hear them overhead. Pipe. A single blow on whistle. Over the early weeks of the nesting season, I observed as home became pinpointed into a divot in the sand, a few inches in diameter. Hardly distinguishable from the shape of the world around it, and yet set apart, the chosen place for new life.
The first plover nest was claimed by the sea in a high spring tide that pulled the ocean all the way to the slopes of the dunes. The pair nested again, this time further up into the grass.
Piping plovers are in the order Charadriiformes which arose during the Cretaceous Era, around 90 million years ago.
Unlike songbird vocalizations—which are learned by every new generation of bird, passed from adult to child—shorebird vocalizations are innate. A piping plover chick will grow into an adult that pipes the same single note at the same frequency, without having been taught. This means that there is little geographic variation in calls, across the range of the species. Nor is there much variation across vast spans of time.
In an article published by the American Ornithological Society, entitled “Antiquity of Shorebird Acoustic Displays,”1 the authors write that the songs of some shorebirds, including the genus Charadrius, which includes the piping plover, “may be extremely ancient.” It’s even possible, they conclude, that “sounds similar to those of extant shorebirds contributed to the biological soundscape >65 million years ago” and that “despite the demise of the dinosaurs, a part of their acoustic environment may live on in their…bird relatives.”
Isn’t that wonderful? That hearing a piping plover today carries the possibility of hearing a sound that reached the ears of dinosaurs? A sound that has endured for millennia and millennia, carried across the eons in the vessel of speckled eggs, laid on the sand.
What can be heard in such a sound?
“It is our misfortune,” writes Rachel Carson in The Sense of Wonder,2 “that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.” Wonder, she writes, is “an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”
First of all, I love the idea of wonder as a sense in itself. One that can be paired with our other bodily senses.
Second, I didn’t know back then that the calls of plovers might have provided an aural link between me and an ancient biological soundscape. But that’s part of the beauty of wonder: that it layers and deepens with both experience and knowledge. Just as a shorebird call can be a tether between landscapes millions of years apart, wonder can be a tether between ourselves and the living world, a means of care and attention, a way of becoming invested in the fate of another.
Such that, within a single note piped by a single bird, multiple worlds might unfold. Worlds we care to protect.
Today, the world of the piping plover is a precarious one. The bird is listed as either threatened or endangered across its range. Once relentlessly hunted for their feathers, today the threats to their endurance as a species include shoreline development, predators whose populations boom alongside human presence, beach traffic (cars, feet, pets), and climate change.
The plover eggs that summer hatched into four fuzzy cotton balls with toothpick legs. Plover chicks are precocial, meaning they can walk within minutes of hatching, and forage for their own food on their first day of life. So it was.
This was a critical time. If the chicks survived their first five weeks—the time it would take for them to make their first flights—I would breathe a sigh of relief and log them as “fledged.” If they made it to this point, their chances of living to adulthood would increase dramatically.
But a few days into their fragile lives, I arrived to tire tracks on the beach. Two thick lines bisecting bird habitat. I walked along them, dreading what I might find.
And there was one chick, unmoving and pressed into the sand, the tread of a Jeep running on and on beyond it, unseeing. I still remember being surprised that it took months before I could think of that chick without tears welling in my eyes.
“We are increasingly disconnected from sensory, storied relationship to life’s community,” writes David George Haskell in his book Sounds Wild and Broken.3 “This rupture is part of the sensory crisis. We become estranged from both the beauty and brokenness of much of the living world. This destroys the necessary sensory foundation for human ethics. The crises in which we live, then, are not just ‘environmental,’ of the environs, but perceptual. When the most powerful species on Earth ceases to listen to the voices of others, calamity ensues. The vitality of the world depends, in part, on whether we turn our ears back to the living Earth.”
Reading those lines, I think of a plover chick lying still in the pattern of a car’s tread. I think of what else we—I—tread upon, in all the ways I still don’t know how to listen.
There are piping plovers nesting here in Maine. Their numbers are rising. One day at Higgins beach this summer, I heard that single note call. A piping plover came down to land just a few feet from where Aspen, Andy, and I were sitting. Later, when Aspen took off to run up the beach, a large group of plovers (I counted 14 of them, far more than I’ve ever seen at once), seemed to gather and congregate around her, as if taking her in as one of their own (though I expect this was a mother’s wishful projection).
Nonetheless, as Aspen ran, the birds ran with—not away from—her, forming a V, with this little girl amidst them and the little gray-white feathered bodies arranging themselves in an arrow ahead of her, one that she happily obliged, needing no other direction than to follow the birds.
My husband, Andy, recently wrote a children’s book about the piping plover, with art by Bruce Hutchison. You can hear the audio version here:
Paired with an original song by Marc W. Pinansky (!) which you can listen to here:
If you’d like a copy of your own, email Andy at: thepennprogram@gmail.com
Fall Writing Workshops
This fall, I’m pleased to offer two writing workshops, one in-person and one virtual. If you’re interested in either or both, please email me at chelseascudder@gmail.com to register & reserve your place!
I. Sense-Making & Sensory Worlds (online):
In three sessions, through the incredible sensory worlds of three species—barn owls, hemlock trees, and North Atlantic right whales—we’ll consider how to expand our sensory experiences of the living world, and how to write about those experiences.
From sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing—to wonder, awe, intuition, and wildness—we’ll write, read, and imagine together!
When:
October 12, 7:00-8:30pm EST (Zoom)
October 19, 7:00-8:30pm EST (Zoom)
October 26, 7:00-8:30pm EST (Zoom)
Cost:
Sliding scale, $25-$75
To register: visit my website
II. Writing at the Edge (in-person):
In this time of great change, when we all live at the edge of certainty, at the edge of guarantee, how do we write about the places where we live from within transformation and change?
Saltmarshes—tidal ecosystems at the border of land and sea—offer us a glimpse of what is possible at the edge and invite us to peer at what is held within fluid boundaries. Together, we’ll explore Scarborough Marsh, meeting the tides and the marsh grasses to ask: What can be learned from the beings who inhabit the edge—who do not resist the ebb and flow of water, but exist as part of it, who live because of it?
From the boundary between joy and sorrow, hope and fear, love and grief, this three-part nature writing workshop explores how nature writing can help us navigate vulnerable edges.
At the end of three sessions, we’ll each work to produce a personal nature writing essay.
Where:
Scarborough Marsh, Scarborough, ME
When:
Spring 2024 (please register on my website or email me to stay up-to-date!)
Cost:
Sliding scale, $75-$150
News & Updates
I’m excited to share a new piece out in Emergence Magazine, in collaboration with photographer Russel Albert Daniels:
Speaking Wind-Words (emergencemagazine.org)
On the wind-sculpted dunes of Nebraska’s Sandhills, I consider the collision of prophecies that occurred over the Great Plains in the nineteenth century, forever altering the landscape; and how places shape—and are shaped by—human language and intent.
Edward H. Miller and Allan J. Baker, "Antiquity of Shorebird Acoustic Displays," The Auk, Vol. 126, No. 2 (April 2009), pp. 454-459.
Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, California: The Nature Company, 1956).
David George Haskell, Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction (New York: Viking, 2022).
I’ve been thinking lately about the predominant way in which children grow up now: urban, tech-based, scheduled, rushed. I’ve been wondering whether that way of growing inhibits the potential for children to sustain and deepen their love for the natural world around them. I’ve been worrying about that: how can one act in the interests of, with compassion for, heck - even want to save - something that one doesn’t love? Where will that leave us when it comes to understanding what’s really required when it comes to climate change?
This essay spoke to those thoughts. Thank you.
I love this piece--what a treasure your writing is! The beauitful sense of wonder your piece evokes. and I like the conenction you make to Rachel Carson's brilliant book and work. It can seem like we lose that sense of wonder, and often spend our adult years trying to find it again. Your essay is one place wonder can be found.
I also like the discovery that piping Plovers and other song birds may be an ancient species, and are messengers from the eras long past- connecting past present and future.
I also love that Aspen, Andy and you are blessed to explore this world of wonder together. What a wonder-full journey it is and will be!