EDITORIAL: Face the music — rare piping plovers must be protected

If we have to choose between two endangered birds and two days of music at Montrose Beach — we’re with the birds.

We’ll side with the rare Great Lakes piping plover, protected under the Endangered Species Act, much as we take great pride in Chicago’s summer music scene. We’re far from convinced that JAM Productions has a plan — or could devise one — that would sufficiently protect the tiny beach-dwelling birds from loud music and thousands of concertgoers.

Up to 40,000 music fans are expected to show up for MAMBY On the Beach in late August. Experts tell us that’s a bad time for such an event at Montrose Beach, both for nesting plovers and for other bird species that will be in the midst of migration season.

There might be time, though not much, for the Chicago Park District to forge a compromise between JAM and bird enthusiasts who object to the concert location. The park district has yet to grant a permit. They hold the cards and can ensure the birds’ habitat is protected — or, as a last resort, force the concert to move elsewhere.

The two Great Lakes piping plovers, rarely seen in Illinois, showed up at Montrose Beach last month. Only 70 pairs are known to exist at all, so bird advocates set up a rotating group of volunteers to guard their nest.

JAM has proposed to pay for more security to keep festival-goers away from the nesting area, and maybe that’ll do it. JAM has extensive experience in running shows responsibly.

But we can’t get past the warnings of Douglas Stotz, a senior conservation ecologist at the Field Museum of Natural History, who told us that protecting the plovers is only part of the story.

“We don’t know when they will lay eggs and when the chicks will fledge, so we don’t know if they will have flown away in time for the music festival,” Stotz said. “It is not just about the disturbance from the people, but if they are still actively nesting, music festivals are loud. That is going to be a disturbance, even if you have armed guards following the plovers around.”

At least 345 bird species have been sighted over the years at Montrose Beach, which is located along a natural bird migration corridor. “It frustrates me,” Stotz said, “that we have one of the best places on the planet up at Montrose for migratory birds, and everybody wants to put everything there.”

Chicago is hardly alone in having to wrestle with this decades-old dilemma — when and how to protect endangered species. Our city can learn from the experiences of others.

In Massachusetts, for example, the protection of their piping plovers definitely comes first. When an accommodation to assure the birds’ safety could not be worked out, Massachusetts has done such things as move fireworks displays to another beach and rerouted beach runs.

In Massachusetts, plovers nests that are near humans are supposed to be protected by a fence with a 50-meter radius. But even then, experts there say, the chicks might stray beyond that, looking for food. And plovers, who consider humans to be predators, can be stressed out by crowds and loud music.

Unfledged chicks are “very vulnerable to beach activity,” Katharine Parsons, director of the Coastal Waterbird Program at the Massachusetts Audubon Society, told us. “The risk to them is really great.”

Jerry Mickelson of JAM Productions told the Sun-Times the company is exploring contingency plans to move the festival farther into the park space, away from the beach, because the water level in Lake Michigan could rise.

If the water level does not rise, couldn’t the fest still be moved farther into the park to protect the plovers and other beach birds? Might that solve the problem?

We suspect, based on the best advice of ornithologists, that it would not.

Can the Park District work out a reasonable compromise? We don’t know. But where there is doubt, they should side with the birds.

Send letters to letters@suntimes.com