Science & Nature
Pepper the Piping Plover Has Landed in Waukegan, Joining Chicago’s Arrivals
A newly hatched piping plover chick checks out the beach in Waukegan under a watchful parent's eye, June 2025. (Courtesy of Carolyn Lueck)
Look who blew in with the winds: Pepper the piping plover.
For the third year in a row, Pepper has returned to his summer home on Lake Michigan, having been spotted over the weekend at the restricted Waukegan beach where he’s become a regular, according to Lake County Audubon Society.
“We are so encouraged that Pepper has survived another migration, one of the most challenging journeys in a bird’s life, and returned to Waukegan,” said Carolyn Lueck, president of Lake County Audubon Society.
Now the wait is on for Pepper’s mate, Blaze. The pair successfully nested in 2024, rearing three chicks to fledge stage. In 2025, only one of the pair’s four chicks survived. In 2025, Blaze arrived on May 6.
Blaze and Pepper were captive-reared and released in Waukegan in 2023, in the hopes they would return and diversify the piping plover population outside of its concentration in northern Michigan.
The strategy paid off, and in 2025 four more captive-reared chicks were released in Waukegan.
Lake County’s vast expanse of protected shoreline makes it an ideal site for additional plover nests, Lueck said, and historically, the area has supported greater numbers of the birds.
Watch: WTTW News Explains: What’s the Story Behind Chicago’s Piping Plovers?
“Chicagoans used to take the train (here) to view plovers and prairie chickens,” she said, in the decades before the Great Lakes population dwindled to the point of being an endangered species.
Last year, 88 pairs of piping plovers nested across the Great Lakes, the greatest number recorded since recovery efforts were undertaken.
Those pairs include Chicago’s lovebirds, Imani and Sea Rocket. Sea Rocket, another captive-reared piping plover, was released at the city’s Montrose Beach in 2023 and has also returned two years in a row to breed with wild-born Imani. Plover monitors are still anxiously awaiting Sea Rocket’s arrival at Montrose.
Contact Patty Wetli: [email protected]
