By Kevin Herrera
Daily Press Staff Writer

SM BEACH These guests aren’t the typical Santa Monica tourists.

For starters, they stay around a lot longer than the average visitor — around 10 months or so. They prefer to sleep out on the beach instead of a luxury hotel, and, above all, they’re threatened.

These out-of-towners are Western Snowy Plovers, small shorebirds about the size of a sparrow who fly into town around July and hang out on the sand, waiting for the right time to head north to breed.

The problem with that is, so many other tourists and locals love to hang out on the beach too, creating a conflict that has put the Plovers’ lives in danger.

“It depends on who you talk to, but you’ve probably got 2,000 breading pair of coastal Western Snowy Plovers left,” said Lu Plauzoles, president of the Santa Monica Bay Audubon Society, which has been tracking the number of Plovers who have made a small stretch of beach near the old Marion Davies estate their home.

“The highest count we’ve ever had in Santa Monica was 52 years ago,” Plauzoles said. “This past year they were in the 20s and this year we’ve seen about that same number.”

Snowy Plovers have natural predators like falcons, raccoons, coyotes, and owls, according to those working to protect the birds, which were declared a threatened species in 1993 under the Endangered Species Act. There are also predators which humans have introduced or have helped increase in population, including crows and ravens, red fox, and domestic dogs. Humans can be thought of as predators too, because we drive vehicles, ride bikes, fly kites and bring dogs to beaches.

Energy is very important to this small bird. Every time humans, dogs, or other predators cause the birds to take flight or run away, they lose precious energy that is needed to maintain their nests. Often, when a Plover parent is disturbed, it will abandon its nest, which increases the chance of a predator finding the eggs, sand blowing over and covering the nest, or the eggs getting cold. This can decrease the number of chicks that hatch in a particular year. Disturbing or harming the birds may result in a citation and a fine.

During the spring and summer months, Plovers nest in loose colonies, often coming back to the same beaches year after year. The breeding season lasts from early spring to mid-fall, and during that time the females may hatch more than one brood with different males. The nests are simple scrapes in the sand housing one to three eggs that the male warms at night. Female work the day shift. Eggs hatch in about 27 days, and within hours the chicks are searching for their food of insects and other beach invertebrates. The chicks are on their own within 30 days.

The birds are camouflaged very well, their backs colored a light brown to match the color of the sand. This protects them from predators, but also makes them vulnerable to disruption.

That’s why City Hall is working with the Audubon Society to protect the Plovers. City staff has erected a fence around the birds and has posted signs alerting people to their presence. Beach maintenance staff has also stopped raking the sand in that area so as not to disturb the birds and what they feed on, which include brine flies, brine fly larvae and brine shrimp.

“I believe this is our fourth straight year building the fence,” said Dean Kubani, manager of the Environmental Programs Division for City Hall. “It has been very effective and the birds keep coming back … I think this just shows the way that animals and humans can coexist.”

With the Annenberg Community Beach Club scheduled to open in 2009, bringing more activity to a fairly underutilized section of beach where the Plovers reside, Kubani said more education will have to be done to inform visitors about the birds.

While Plovers haven’t reproduced in Santa Monica since the 1940s, there is hope that the measures taken by City Hall and the Audubon Society will be enough to get the birds in the mood to breed here.

“The question you ask yourself when dealing with a bird that comes back to the same spot, within 100 feet, every single year, wouldn’t that bird be hard-wired to breed in that area,” said Plauzoles, who has tracked the birds and knows that they breed at the Vandenberg Air Force Base in central California. “So if we were to shelter them enough here, would they breed here and have their numbers go up? That’s the birds’ call.”

kevinh@smdp.com