WHEN Diane Lewis wanders along a beach, she pays close attention to things most of us wouldn’t notice.
“When we stayed at our Mornington Peninsula holiday house I used to walk along the beach and look out to sea – I rarely look at the water now,” she said.
“I’d often seen signs about the hooded plover, and one day got talking to a ranger who was putting up fences to protect nests.
“I started taking notice, saw chicks hatching, watched them grow and learn to fly – I was hooked.”
Hooded plovers are medium-sized non-migratory shorebirds that live their whole life on the beach. There are fewer than 600 in Victoria and about 75 in the Mornington Peninsula National Park, which has the state’s lowest chick survival rate.
The greatest threat comes from increased human visitation. Nests can be easily crushed or trampled.
Predators include egg-eating birds, including silver gulls, magpies and ravens, as well as foxes and dogs.
In 2010 Parks Victoria approached Diane and another volunteer Val Ford to set up a Friends of the Hooded Plover Mornington Peninsula group.
Late last year, the group won one of Parks Victoria’s biennial Kookaburra Awards in the Conserving Special Places category.
Diane, who is president, has seen the group grow from the 12 who gathered at the inaugural meeting to a membership of about 70 today, of whom 20 regularly patrol beaches.
“Most of our volunteers are retired or work part-time, some live on the Peninsula and others commute from Melbourne,” she said.
“We have people from all walks of life, including a mixture of retired teachers, vets, nurses and other professions.”
During breeding season the main aim is to locate nests and protect them where necessary.
“Trained volunteers work with Parks Victoria rangers and erect temporary fences around nests and sign the area,” Diane said.
“The beach is visited every two or three days to check the birds are still incubating and signage and fencing is still in place.
“If a nest is successfully incubated for 28 days then our volunteers will change the fencing formation to what we call ‘chick fencing’, which is using ropes and signage to section off part of the upper beach. This gives the birds somewhere to retreat to.”
While the birds are as well protected as possible, the project is long-term and it is too early to tell how much impact the group’s activities have had.
“It will probably never get to the point where they can survive on the beach without our intervention,” Diane said.
