the piping plover has galvanized new york city conservationists with its charisma and adorable babies. but protecting the plover is a tough battle to fight. few, if any young survive, dying at the hands of people and predators in the country’s largest city. it’s easy to get discouraged.
but even if no plovers survive, the conservation work is valuable. because plover conservation helps an equally imperiled and arguably equally adorable plant: seabeach amaranth. and you could say that protecting the amaranth, in turn, will further help the plovers in the future.
i laughed the first time i saw seabeach amaranth in the wild. it’s kinda like a piping plover if it was a plant. it emerges from the sand as a minuscule clump of round, green, waxy leaves with pinkish accents. it eventually branches into a low clump of pink stems supporting its thick leaves, usually growing a few inches tall and up to a foot wide. it ranges from south carolina to massachussetts sprouting annually in the early summer and producing itty bitty flowers on its stem as the summer comes to an end. its flowers turn to fruits, and the plant survives until winter’s frost. in other words, if you’re inspired by this blog to go see them, you only have a few weeks left.
despite its small size, seabeach amaranth is a main character on the beach. a large amaranth plant can produce thousands of seeds in a year, which look much like grains of sand. these seeds either sit right beneath their parent or disperse via wind and storm surges, carried through the air or water in small inflated sacs. as nature creates new beach and erodes old beach, it reveals buried amaranth seeds and deposits new ones from afar; these seeds are remarkably resilient and can lay dormant for many years. once the plants sprout, their roots act as anchors for the sand and promote sand dune development on the new shore, creating habitat for beach life like the plover. eventually, other beach plants outcompete the amaranth and the process begins again with seeds dispersed elsewhere, according to a blog post by colleen andrews for the usfws northeast region.
but, while amaranth loves the precarity of beach living, humans don’t—to the plant’s detriment. humans build large structures like jetties and breakwaters to stabilize beaches and cease natural shore-shaping processes. by preventing beach erosion, developers also stymie the disturbance processes required for an early-successional plant like seabeach amaranth to thrive. of course, these plants also fall victim to disturbance that’s too intense; beach raking, vehicles on the beach, overuse of the habitat, that kind of stuff.
so, by the time seabeach amaranth was listed as endangered in the early 1990s, it had disappeared from every state in its range except for new york and the carolinas, and in new york, it had only just been refound after a 40 year disappearance. the global population of the plant had dropped from 250,000 to 1,300, according to the usfws.
conservation organizations went about collecting seeds to try and establish populations elsewhere. they also roped off parts of the beach at the base of the sand dunes to prevent the most easily-avoided cause of the plant’s decline. in some cases, these “symbolic fences” were specifically for the amaranth. but in others, the amaranth was simply taking advantage of a free resource: the same symbolic fences constructed for the piping plover.
atlantic-breeding piping plover habitat is identical to amaranth habitat, so they struggle with some of the same human-induced threats, which disrupt plover nests and can kill babies directly. following the plover’s listing as threatened in 1985, the federal government started building the same fences to try and reduce disturbance and promote plover nesting. in new york state, most of our amaranth sites now sit within areas fenced off to protect the piping plover, according to the center for biological diversity.
the efforts worked, at first. less than 500 nys amaranth plants in 1990 became 190,500 plants in 2002. since then, the population has fluctuated wildly; nys surveys have counted between hundreds and hundreds of thousands of plants in the past 20 years. on the longer term, the plant will probably stabilize in the thousands or tens of thousands of plants, according to the new york natural heritage program.
but the plovers only help so much, because avoiding human disturbance doesn’t get at the core of the problem. amaranth is a live-for-today kind of plant, designed to survive the precarity of beach life. americans living near northeastern beaches are not that, and insist on building long-term structures atop landmasses that nature considers temporary. even trying to conserve beach environments might harm the amaranth, since it gets out-competed by beach grass used by humans to stabilize dunes.
and then there’s climate change. the sea level is rising faster than seabeach amaranth is used to, and shoreline isn’t necessarily being replenished at the same rate that the sea is claiming it. how will the amaranth fare? it’s not clear, and how we approach mitigating the effects of climate change on shorelines might have an impact on amaranth’s future. there’s a lot we don’t know about the amaranth, too.
at least for now, supporting plover conservation in nyc is a good stopgap for those who care about the plant—hopefully the swell in interest for conserving the piping plovers will continue to benefit seabeach amaranth. but the long-term outlook for the plant, and bird, brings up a few more existential questions about the world we want to live in. do we want to ensure that beaches remain static resources immune to erosion and sea level rise, at the expense of plants like amaranth? or will we be able to accept the precarity required by life on the beach and pursue solutions that promote ecological diversity? dunno. but i’d guess that whatever happens isn’t going to be the option that prioritizes a miniature plant, regardless of its importance.
postscript
i’m leading a walk on saturday, 11/11, from 9am to 11am in prospect park. we’re meeting at the 9th st/prospect park west entrance. registration not required but encouraged.
this is my favorite time of year for birding from my apartment. the diversity of birds obviously isn’t as high as it is during may or september, but the number of birds is mind-boggling. i’ve already had a few days with a thousand american robins (who are migratory!) and earlier this week had a single flock with over a thousand grackles that seemed to span the sky. i’ve also had my share of less common nyc birds: pine siskins, bluebirds, rusty blackbirds, and red-shouldered hawks. i have seen 299 bird species in brooklyn and really want number 300 to be something from the roof—sandhill crane, rough-legged hawk, golden eagle, or some vagrant goose all feel totally possible.
anyway, here’s a few hundred grackles and a single rusty blackbird from an especially good roof day.
