Scientific Research - Hooded Plover

The Hooded Plover
By Billy McFall

A hooded plover (Thinornis Rubricollis) is a small bird, about 10 cm tall, 20 cm long and weighs about 90-100 g. They feed on insects, sand hoppers, small bivalves, and soldier crabs. Their nests are a little indent on the ground, just in front of the dunes. The hooded plover is slowly becoming extinct, but they are in the venerable group. The cause of the hooded plover becoming extinct is people running along the beaches not even looking out or nests and just running over them. The hooded plover has no way to defend its self, the only way it can protect its nest is by walking away from their nests, so that we follow them, leading us away from the nest. Once they think their nest is safe they fly out to sea and then back towards their nests. A solution to help save the hooded plover would be to stop people driving on the beach, even though its fun, you could be crushing heaps of nests, and putting up signs, telling people that hooded plovers inhabit this area.

The aim of this session was to collect data about the hooded plovers inhabiting Emu Beach at Innes National Park, where their nests are, what the predators are, what behaviours they display around people and what the nests look like. We were lucky enough to be walking about two meters behind them. We first saw the Hooded Plovers on our way back to the bus. We didn’t see them at first, but we saw a lot of tracks in the sand, we saw lots of sea gulls, pacific gulls, what we thought were hooded plovers, small predators tracks, and then our tracks. The other groups signalled to us to stop walking and pointed at the ground, and then we saw two hooded plovers walking side by side. We spotted them around 1.45 PM. We were walking behind them for about 30 minutes. They walked quite close together, side by side, walking towards the water and then when a wave came, they would run towards the dunes. We took alot of photos, so now we can see what they look like. When we were looking for the nests we watched where we were walking and hen we saw alot of tracks we would send one person up to look for a nest, but we were unlucky and didn’t see any nests.

With the research we did yesterday I found out that the population of the hooded plover is slowly depleting. The hooded plover has a low percent of one adult having a child and that child making it to the adult stage, the ratio is 9:500. So the hooded plover has a very low, almost no chance of surviving. This was proved because we only saw 2 hooded plovers on the whole beach. Some more evidence that the hooded plover has a slim chance of survival is that we saw alot of other prints on the sand, belonging to seagulls, pacific gull and some predators, like lizards, cats, dogs, etc. We also didn’t see any nests. This showed that there weren’t many hooded plovers, and that they aren’t reproducing. Since the hooded plover are venerable, only time will make them extinct, unless we can start doing something about it. If we do nothing then they will become extinct in years to come.

We have discovered that the hooded plover doesn’t live in large quantities. They are struggling to survive, with al of he people that walk on the beach that could be crushing the hooded plovers nests without even knowing it, and he dirt bikes and cars that drive on the beaches The hooded plover could have a higher chance of survival if we put up signs at the beaches, telling people that they live there, and ban vehicles on the beach to prevent as many nests being crushed.

I think if everyone was more aware of the hooded plover and what the nests look like, and if we stopped driving on the beach, we could see a difference. The hooded plover surviving isn’t impossible, but they will become extinct if we don’t do anything about it.