Regarding Piping Plovers and other losers

[urbpan]

A group of zoo staff recently went as a group to a local beach to help restore habitat for shore birds, including piping plovers. A friend posted on facebook about it, how much they enjoyed the day, and how he appreciated learning about the complexities of doing conservation work when different stakeholders have input and so on

Comments

[gryfindormia]

No chance they were being tongue-in-cheek? Because I'd say something like that only if I knew everyone knew I was joking/pretending I was a crazy Christian who thinks she understands evolution and WHAT HO! tries to refute it with "dumb birds can't make safe nests, lol".

[temeres]

We will always have the rats and house sparrows

Possibly not the latter in the UK, where they've declined heavily (though I have noticed more this year).

Never mind, there's always pigeons...

[ndozo]

I can imagine blurting out something like that. But what I would have meant was: I wonder how these little Plovers have managed to survive all this time even before human encroached on their territory? It seems amazing that any of their eggs ever lasted long enough to hatch considering how vulnerable their nests are.

[urbpan]

Plovers nest out in the open because the camouflage of their eggs and chicks is so effective that avian predators have a hard time seeing them. The plovers can see mammalian predators coming from a long distance on open beaches--they won't successfully nest if there is vegetation that mammals can hide behind or in. If a mammalian predator gets close, plovers perform a distraction display to lure it away from the nest. It seems weird, but it worked until cars and dogs got to the beaches.

[ndozo]

Also, unrelated, why do frogs cross the road? Seriously. I had a seemingly endless horrible drive on hundreds of miles of back roads, and every couple of minutes a frog would leap out and try to get me to run over it. For the first time, I understood the inspiration for frogger. What are they doing?

[urbpan]

Frogs and other amphibians migrate from breeding sites to feeding sites and back. When frogs are disturbed they hop in a quick and unpredictable way, which works good against many predators, but not cars.

[shadefell]

I get angry when people complain about pandas in the zoo being "too stupid" to mate "to save their species." Right. Because drastically altering their habitat, reducing their range, and shoving them in with strangers they might not be compatible with is a surefire way to foster successful mating. It's totally about them being stupid/stubborn/failures and not about them not being in the correct healthy environment. OF COURSE.