Coal Oil Point Reserve

In 2021, we continued with the monitoring of the Western Snowy Plover (WSP) population at Coal OilPoint Reserve as in previous years. The number of breeding adults this year (56) was higher than theaverage (37) for our site. The wintering population size (175) was just over the average (167). This year,predation was the primary cause of nest failure. There were three cases of take by people on Sands Beach. The eggs from 3 nests were removed and in 2 of the nests that had exclosures, the exclosure wasremoved and vandalized. Implementation of Australian crow traps this year prevented crow predation.However, one quarter of all nests were predated by skunks and an additional 8% were lost to unknownpredators. In response to the high levels of predation by skunks, all nests present on or laid after July 13thwere collected, incubated until near the hatching date, and then returned to the parents. The real eggswere replaced with wooden eggs so that the parents would continue incubating. COPR had a lower thanaverage hatching rate (35%) and a high fledging rate (72%) (this analysis excludes the 8 out of 8 neststhat hatched with the egg replacement technique). The number of fledged chicks per male (1.5) was belowaverage for our site but exceeded our site's recovery goal of 1.0 fledged chicks per male. 99% of nests(92) were initiated on the beach, and 1% (1) were initiated on the mudflats of the slough (delta).