Duxbury Beach has a breeding population of Piping Plovers. They also have a thriving population of foxes and coyotes.
Piping Plovers are threatened with becoming endangered. There are about 6500 left in the planet. Half of them are on the Atlantic seaboard, a good portion of that half (estimated 600+ pairs) are in Massachusetts and a good chunk (24 breeding pairs) of that portion are on Duxbury Beach.
Piping Plovers are cute, McNugget sized birds who have one really huge flaw. They nest in the sand. There's nothing wrong with that, if you are of a large population which can withstand an owl snatching a few of your kids or a losing encounter with a Duxbury Cadillac.
It doesn't work if those deaths occur among a worldwide population of 6500. 6500 isn't that much, perhaps akin to Black Republicans or Chain Smoking Marathon Runners. Those losses lower the numbers, and increase the risk of inbreeding.
If the coyote has a good hunting season- and we know from cartoons that coyotes generally have catastrophic experiences when chasing fast birds- that's all she wrote for the P Double population on a particular beach.
Coyote don't use ACME products when hunting plovers, are therefore not involved in many explosions and subsequently have a far greater success rate than a fan of Road Runner may have been led to believe.
Foxes have about the same luck, as do hawks and even crows.
People also crush a Piper from time to time, either by stomping on them or running them over with SUVs. Piping ain't easy, as the rappers say.
Duxbury Beach is a popular destination for people, carnivores and Pipers. This brings forth "two wolves and a sheep vote on what to have for dinner" allusions that are most uncomfortable for the Piper.
The Duxbury Beach Reservation inherits the responsibility for protecting these vulnerable birds. I'm not sure what the penalty is for letting an endangered species die out in your town (or who applies/enforces it), but it must be a substantial one, because the DBR spends a lot of time/effort/money looking out for these little f***ers.
Part of that effort involves fairly unpopular acts like limiting beach access. Another part involves the wildly unpopular act of a fox cull. It is called either "mitigation" or "eradication," depending on who you ask.
The DBR, whose hands are tied by environmental regulations, is paying somebody (we asked, we'll see if they answer) to shoot the foxes and poison the predatory birds on Duxbury Beach. A similar cull went down last year, killing several coyote, foxes and birds.
(Update: the USDA APHIS Wildlife Services employs the shooters. If I lived on King Caesar Road, I would do nothing at all in the east-facing side of the house on Eradication Day.)
Outrage, started after a series of Facebook posts began spreading around, was immediate and intense. 5000 names went on a petition calling for an end to the cull. There was a protest at a Duxbury supermarket.
A supermarket full of edible animals seems like a funny place for a save-animals protest... but to be quite honest, I got into journalism as a sportswriter, and often miss those forest/tree things that book-learning type people see almost immediately. One also thinks that at least one of the fox cull protesters has a stole at home, perhaps innocently.
The DBR has few options. Electric fencing, which is used on some North Shore beaches, is not cost effective on Duxbury Beach. The DBC is a dynamic beach, with shifting sands and various surf/fetch heights. It is also, to my knowledge, the longest stretch of uninhabited coastline in Massachusetts west of the Outer Cape.
Electric fencing also poses a threat of frying the Pipers, although the cruel part of my brain ponders the possibility of having a 20 piece McNugget meal made from wildly endangered birds. The King's going crazy!
Ironically, and unlike the bumper stickers tell us, Piping Plovers do not taste like chicken. Few shorebirds do. Their flavor, I'd imagine, is more like Duck and quite possibly like Gull. Maybe somebody at the Ming Dynasty can work with that, but the only small-bird recipe I know is the swashbuckling "four and twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie."
I bet Stacey would know. She's French, they have a recipe for everything. But I digress...
There isn't much a person can do to stop this. The DBR is fixed on this course. You can't go to the government, as they are the ones mandating the cull. Redd Foxx is dead.
Even terrorism would be ineffective.
We kicked a few ecoterrorism ideas around, and came up with nothing better than A) identifying the day of the hunt, B) going down to Saquish with as many people/dogs as you could gather X hours before the shooting starts, C) forming a skirmish line, D) marching towards the seawall neighborhood on North Duxbury Beach, which is where the Reservation power ends and where the foxes den, and E) flush every fox into the relative safety of Marshfield. You can't shoot what ain't there, even that Bradley Cooper guy from the sniper movie.
This seems like a good idea, save for a few flaws. The DBR would most likely call in Johnny Law, and the charges range from laugh-it-off Trespassing to some obscure Interfering With A Government Operation federal charge that gets you in the Big Boy Prison. "I butchered a gang rival," said the Latin King to his new cellmate. "What are you in here for?"
Flushing foxes into Green Harbor also puts them on roads, in a panic. That may kill as many foxes as a cull would. Kits would be just as orphaned if Mom got shot by Bradley Cooper, run over by a Mini-Cooper or mauled by Cooper the German Shepherd.
People think of Man as not being natural, which is a mistake. We are just monkeys who climbed down from the trees and eventually figured out things like fire, oil and apartment buildings. We have become dominant on this planet because of the advantages that nature gave us, and because of our ability to adapt to any scenario.
Plovers are at the other end of this scale. They are one of nature's mistakes, fatally flawed, "never even considered for mass production."
The foxes and the SUVs can't get to the eggs of the birds smart enough to nest in trees. The birds who nest in trees have more offspring survive. Plovers are dying out.
Foxes, who humans have tried to wipe out before, are now flourishing. They flourish because they can adapt. They are perfectly functional around man and his housing. If he eats a plover egg, he is doing exactly what nature designed him to do.
You have to just let nature take her course... even if nature herself is angling the unadaptive shorebird towards Extinction.
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