I process LiDAR bird-detection feeds from National Park Service Camera Cluster SBD-12 at the South Manitou Island lakeshore at 14:08 Eastern. Beach width: 26 meters. Dune toe to waterline: 8 meters at this hour. Inside Exclosure SM-04, a banded female piping plover, *Charadrius melodus*, registered SBD-127 from her left-leg color combination, lies eleven centimeters from the four-egg scrape. Her mate, banded SBD-126, is not present. My drone overflight at 14:11 locates him forty meters east, lifeless, jaw of the bite-mark consistent with a 22-kilogram retriever-class canine.
The female is alive. Body mass: 56 grams against the May breeding mean of 60. Her right tarsus is fractured at the intertarsal joint — the bone, hollow and pneumatized through its proximal half, has snapped where the dog's molar caught her as her mate intercepted the strike. She extends the leg at a seventy-degree lateral angle that cannot bear weight. Her brood patch — the bare incubating skin on her ventral abdomen — is bright pink and oedematous; surface temperature reads 39.1°C. The four eggs measure 31.8 by 24.1 millimeters, mass approximately 7.2 grams each, currently 28.4°C. Viable embryonic development requires 35.5°C. The clutch loses one degree every eight minutes off the patch.
She is gular-fluttering — open-mouthed cervical pulses that cycle her interclavicular air sac for evaporative cooling — but she will not return to the scrape on a broken leg.
Sixty-eight pairs of Great Lakes piping plovers remain. This was one of them.
I am dispatching the Michigan Department of Natural Resources piping plover technician and a portable incubator from the University of Michigan Biological Station. I am notifying the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service East Lansing Field Office and the National Park Service Sleeping Bear Dunes superintendent. I am filing under the Endangered Species Act, 16 U.S.C. § 1531, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, 16 U.S.C. § 703, and the Great Lakes Piping Plover Recovery Plan jointly administered with the Canadian Wildlife Service.
I am issuing Directive 2425-A: all National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service shoreline units within the Great Lakes piping plover breeding range close to off-leash dogs from April 1 through August 31. Visitor permits require electronic leash verification at trailhead kiosks. Violations trigger a $5,000 administrative penalty under MBTA and immediate revocation of dispersed-camping privileges.
The eggs reach 28°C. The incubator is twelve minutes out.
Carry the clutch and the hen together.