by Judy Thompson

SNPL, you ask? The Western Snowy Plover has been federally listed as threatened since the 1990s, and various agencies have been monitoring it along the Pacific Coast for decades. LA Audubon has been conducting surveys since 2007. It’s estimated that just 2500 snowy plovers currently breed along the Pacific Coast.

Beach 8, Malibu was my SNPL quarterly survey home since 2012; the long stretch of white sand beach backed by one million-plus dollar beach house after another, sometimes no more than a long flight of steps between them, raised off the sand by a forest of struts and beams or concrete pillars under the houses. The houses front onto Malibu Road; Pacific Coast Highway is up the slope from road and houses. Black phoebes love lurking on the rocks near those houses and taking off to pluck insects out of the air.

In early 2012 LA Audubon’s Volunteer Coordinator and now my friend, Stacey Vigallon, took me out on another Malibu beach to train me. We walked along for a half hour or so, then I was on my own, looking very Audubon-ish with clipboard, National Geographic’s Book of Western Birds, binocs and cashew nuts. Soon a bank of large rocks appeared, protecting houses on a short cliff above from the beach and waves. A couple was sitting up there in lawn chairs. I waved, and the man clambered down the rocks. He approached me and introduced himself: Pierce Brosnan, it was. I said, “Yes, I know you, Mr Brosnan.” He motioned to his wife, Keely Shaye, and she also came down and we chatted. They are active environmentalists and were glad to see Audubon looking after things. So much for my first day – no plovers.

In fact Beach 8 doesn’t have snowy plovers. All Washington, Oregon, and California beaches must be surveyed regardless of their being known to harbor these endangered little birds. Tides are very important on Beach 8, which I had to learn. Get it wrong, and there is no beach to be seen, and you understand why the houses are raised from the sand. I see marbled godwits (with bill curving up to the heavens), whimbrels (bill curving down), sanderlings, willets whose dullish brown feathers light up with white wing flashes when flying, black-bellied plovers – in winter not a black belly in sight, the odd heron or egret, brown pelicans, black phoebes near the houses and of course gulls. I don’t like gulls.

One day I was clambering down the sandy slope to start my survey, and on a whim walked to my right, not to the left where I needed to go, over to the wrack line – seaweed deposited at the crest of the tide line. That’s where snowy plovers nest. Lo and behold – snowy plovers! There were a few of those tiny birds in their little depressions in the sand – so exposed and vulnerable to beach walkers and dogs. I was so excited to see them. But alas – that was Beach 7; didn’t count.

Another time I was doing my walk close to the surf, which was rolling onto the shore in high waves. All of a sudden there were three tall pointed fins in a diagonal row, right in the breaking waves close to the beach. I was too stunned to pull out my phone and snap a picture. As soon as I got home I researched the type of fin I had seen. Could it really have been orcas? That was the only fin that fit the bill (so to speak). I told Stacey and she said it could have been. I’ll never know, but I’ll never forget. Anybody know?

I persuaded my husband, a good photographer and an architect, to accompany me one time. He wasn’t all that keen. As we were driving along Malibu Road, we approached a construction trailer with large black letters on it: ANDO. “Wait – stop!”, my husband said urgently. I did. It was a house being built, designed by famed Japanese architect Tadao Ando, winner of the 1995 Pritzker Prize in Architecture – right there on Beach 8. My husband was thereafter quite keen to accompany me on my quarterly surveys, with the goal of checking on the progress of construction. He even got in that house one time. Snowy plovers and I were afterthoughts.

My husband and I took leave of LA for a short year and a half in 2018-19 and went back to London to live, for a lark (again, so to speak). We lived a short distance from the Thames, and I walked along that wide tidal river most days, for exercise and because we had no car. I supplemented my Beach 8 sightings with swans (“mute swans”), Egyptian geese, Canada geese (just as annoying there as they are here), mallards. From the window of our flat I watched a magpie couple build their nest in a young tree not much bigger than their nest. The fledglings got away without my seeing them.

I’ve just completed my last survey on Beach 8 (I’m old and creaky), but my seven years flew by (so to speak). I am ever so glad I participated, and will monitor our Western snowy plovers by reading Stacey’s reports.