Save Duxbury Beach is advocating for a return to a balance between responsible recreation (beach goers), active conservation (protecting plovers and terns) and preservation (preserving barrier beach from erosion due to storms, thus protecting the Duxbury coastline).

 The Duxbury Beach Reservation in coordination with MassWildlife's Coastal Waterbird Office has significantly elevated its monitoring program for piping plovers and least terns beyond basic state & federal requirements. Historically, the organization relied on local high school students to observe and document avian activity on the beach. In recent years, however, it has shifted to hiring more highly qualified personnel, typically college students or recent graduates pursuing or holding degrees in wildlife biology, environmental science, or related fields—often with preferences for those with prior fieldwork experience in avian monitoring.  Job postings for shorebird monitors emphasize candidates working toward or possessing a bachelor's degree (and sometimes advanced coursework), along with skills in data collection, public interaction, and adherence to the Habitat Conservation Plan protocols. This professionalization has transformed the Reservation into a  practical laboratory for aspiring coastal wildlife managers and conservation professionals.  This enhanced staffing contributes to more rigorous data gathering and higher compliance with conservation measures, it has also led to more intensive on-site presence, enforcement of restrictions, and unnecessary management practices that prioritizing bird training and research objectives over recreational access.

Continued seasonal over sand vehicle (OSV) closures will lead to further decreased sticker revenue for the Town of Duxbury. This reduction in revenue  could ultimately result in the Town’s residents’ decision to not renew their annual lease of the beach, something Save Duxbury Beach believes would be detrimental to the preservation of the barrier beach that protects the Duxbury coastline and all the commercial and residential properties along it. 

 Every summer, sections of Duxbury Beach close to protect nesting Least Terns. We support responsible wildlife management — but we believe the data now justifies asking the state to formally revisit this species' listing under the Massachusetts Endangered Species Act (MESA).

Least Terns are listed as a Species of Special Concern under MESA — the least restrictive of the Act's three protected categories (Special Concern, Threatened, Endangered), one step below Threatened and two below Endangered.1 They are not listed at all under the federal Endangered Species Act (only the inland "interior" subspecies, found along Mississippi River tributaries, has ever carried federal protection — and that population was fully delisted in 2021 after recovering from under 2,000 to more than 18,000 birds).2

Statewide, Least Tern numbers have climbed for decades:

• 1974–1979: average of 1,300 nesting pairs statewide3
• 2013: 3,977 pairs statewide4
• 2023: 3,698 pairs statewide
• 2024: 4,318 pairs statewide — a 16.8% increase in a single year 5

Duxbury Beach has driven a meaningful share of that growth:

• Historically, Duxbury Beach supported fewer than 300 pairs in a typical year6
• 2021: a record 473 pairs6
• 2023: 353 pairs, across six separate colonies7
• 2024: 385 pairs — making Duxbury Beach the second-largest Least Tern colony site in Massachusetts, behind only Norton Point in Edgartown 5

Least Terns nest in colonies and defend those nests aggressively. Both parents guard the nest and a surrounding buffer of roughly 3–10 feet, launching repeated attack flights at intruders, calling loudly, and defecating on anyone who gets too close.8 In practice, this means casual beachgoers are driven off well before any physical contact or nest disturbance occurs — a sharp contrast to ground-nesting species with less confrontational defense behavior.

Beach closures and buffer zones on Duxbury Beach are implemented under MESA's "take" protections for Special Concern species. They are administered by the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries & Wildlife's Natural Heritage & Endangered Species Program (MassWildlife), working with Mass Audubon's Coastal Waterbird Program, which conducts the season-long monitoring that generates the population counts above.

MESA requires the state's list of protected species to be formally reviewed at least once every five years.9 Given a statewide population that has more than tripled since the 1970s, a record-setting local colony, and nest-defense behavior that already limits human contact without regulatory intervention, we believe Least Terns warrant a formal re-examination as part of that review — and that current closure policy on Duxbury Beach should be reassessed in light of the trend.

1. 321 CMR 10.90, Massachusetts List of Endangered, Threatened, and Special Concern Species. ↩
    
2. Cornell Lab of Ornithology, All About Birds, Least Tern Overview. ↩
    
3. Mass Audubon, Breeding Bird Atlas, Find a Bird: Least Tern (BBA1). ↩
    
4. MassWildlife, Inventory of Terns, Laughing Gulls, and Black Skimmers Nesting in Massachusetts in 2013. ↩
    
5. MassWildlife, Inventory of Terns, Laughing Gulls, and Black Skimmers Nesting in Massachusetts in 2024 (Feb. 2025). ↩ ↩2
    
6. Duxbury Beach Reservation, Coastal Ecology Program Updates (2021). ↩ ↩2
    
7. Town of Duxbury Beach Operations, Beach Update — 7/28/2023. ↩
    
8. Cornell Lab of Ornithology, All About Birds, Least Tern Life History. ↩
    
9. Massachusetts Endangered Species Act, M.G.L. c. 131A. ↩

Since 2011, the Duxbury Beach Reservation has run a lethal predator management program targeting foxes, coyotes, crows, and grackles — in the name of protecting Piping Plovers and Least Terns. We want to be clear up front: this isn't a program DBR invented or chose out of preference. The mitigation requirement behind it comes from MassWildlife and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service as a condition of the permits that make any beach access possible at all. Our concern isn't with DBR's intentions — it's with whether the underlying mandate, and the specific method chosen to satisfy it, are still justified. We believe it's time to reconsider this practice, on both practical and ethical grounds.

The predator program exists because MassWildlife requires it. DBR holds a sub-permit, issued through MassWildlife under the state's Piping Plover Habitat Conservation Plan, that trades "mitigation" for access flexibility — things like reduced fencing, driving on the back road, and open parking lots — and selective predator management is a stated federal requirement of the incidental take permit behind it.1 DBR did not create this requirement and, as a permit holder, has no legal path to simply opt out of mitigating while keeping that access flexibility. What DBR does have discretion over is how to mitigate: kill predators on-site, or pay into a state fund that finances predator management elsewhere.

The on-site option is dramatically cheaper. DBR has told local reporters that paying into the state fund for the access flexibility it requested in one recent year — 24 "take exposures" — would have cost roughly $144,000, compared to the cost of running the on-beach program itself.1 So while the requirement to mitigate sits squarely with MassWildlife, the choice of killing wildlife over funding off-site alternatives is a cost decision made within that mandate — and that choice, not the existence of the permit system itself, is what we think deserves reconsideration.

Statewide, MassWildlife's own figures put average annual coyote removal for plover management at about six animals per year — a small number relative to the program's public profile and controversy.1 Meanwhile, our site has already documented that since the program began in 2011, there has been no measurable reduction in nest losses attributable to predation. If a program isn't demonstrably moving the outcome it's meant to produce, continuing it — at real cost, both financial and reputational — deserves scrutiny.

Duxbury isn't an outlier here — a growing body of peer-reviewed research raises real doubts about whether killing predators reliably improves nesting outcomes for ground-nesting shorebirds like plovers and terns:

• A controlled study of avian ground-nest predation found that reducing one predator's numbers didn't reduce overall nest losses — other predators, or the same predators returning, compensated for the removal.2 A 2025 review of the broader predator-management literature reached the same conclusion: lethal control <cite index="64-1">"delivers only short-term reductions in abundance owing to compensatory immigration and breeding,"</cite> meaning it typically has to be repeated every year just to hold ground.3
• A 2024 review of ground-nesting bird declines in Europe found that predator control conducted outside tightly controlled experimental conditions <cite index="62-1">"may not have the appropriate intensity or desired effects,"</cite> in part because removing one predator can shift the balance among the remaining ones and increase predation from species that weren't targeted.4
• Even where predator management is actively underway, it doesn't prevent significant losses: in 2024, a heavily managed Least Tern colony in North Carolina still lost meaningful productivity to coyote predation despite an ongoing removal program at the site.5
• New Jersey — home to the largest Atlantic Coast piping plover population after Massachusetts, and the most intensively monitored — tells a similar story to what our own data suggests. Predation has been the leading cause of nest failure for eleven consecutive years despite decades of active state management, and 2023 produced the second-lowest statewide fledgling rate since monitoring began in 1987, well below the federal recovery threshold.6 A 2021 study of New Jersey's barrier islands identified a specific mechanism for why lethal removal can backfire: when red foxes were removed, American mink — a smaller predator that foxes normally suppress — expanded into the vacated territory, a dynamic called mesopredator release, with the potential to cancel out any nest-survival gains from removing the fox in the first place.7

Non-lethal tools have a real track record here too, though they're not a costless fix either. A Cape Cod study across six beaches found that simple wire nest exclosures — no killing required — raised piping plover daily nest survival from 93% to 99% and nearly quadrupled hatching success (74% vs. 19%).8 But exclosures carry a documented risk of their own: by concentrating incubating adults at a fixed, visible location, they can make those adults easier targets for ambush predators. New Jersey's 2023 monitoring found more than half of exclosed nests were abandoned that year, a pattern researchers attribute in part to this dynamic.6 The point isn't that any one tool is a silver bullet — it's that lethal removal hasn't been shown to outperform the non-lethal toolkit by enough to justify killing native wildlife as the default response.

None of the species targeted — red fox, coyote, skunk, crow — are rare, threatened, or endangered. They are common, adaptable species doing what predators do. Killing them to protect a different species is a value judgment, not a neutral wildlife-management default, and the way it has been carried out has drawn direct, on-record objection from Duxbury's own officials.

In 2024, a lactating female coyote and her mate were shot on the beach during pup-rearing season, leaving four pups orphaned. One pup was found, rehabilitated, and later ordered euthanized by the state because there was nowhere to release it.1 Duxbury's animal control officer, who responded to that incident, put it plainly: <cite index="49-1">"killing other species is ethically and morally wrong."</cite> A Duxbury Selectboard member has said the same on the record, adding that the town has been told it has no legal authority to stop the practice under the current arrangement.1

DBR already uses non-lethal deterrents — fencing, raking, flagging, and pallets — in some recreational areas to steer birds away from high-traffic zones.9 These tools work without killing anything. We believe the Reservation and the Town of Duxbury should:

• Expand non-lethal deterrents rather than defaulting to lethal removal as the cheaper mitigation option
• Prohibit the killing of visibly lactating or denning animals during pup-rearing season
• Require independent, published data on nest-loss outcomes before renewing the program each year
• Add lease language — as Duxbury's own Assistant Animal Control Officer has called for — making humane treatment standards a binding condition of the town's beach lease with DBR

1. Susan Hunter, "The price of protection," Duxbury Clipper, April 17, 2024. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5
    
2. Ellis-Felege, S.N., Conroy, M.J., Palmer, W.E., & Carroll, J.P. (2012). "Predator reduction results in compensatory shifts in losses of avian ground nests." Journal of Applied Ecology, 49(3), 661–669. ↩
    
3. "Empirical evidence that diversionary feeding increases productivity in ground-nesting birds," Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2025. ↩
    
4. "The decline of ground nesting birds in Europe: Do we need to manage predation in addition to habitat?" ScienceDirect, 2024. ↩
    
5. Audubon North Carolina, "Coastal Nesting Recap: Piping Plover Fledglings, Poop Research, Coyotes, and More," 2024. ↩
    
6. New Jersey Division of Fish and Wildlife, Piping Plover Nesting Results in New Jersey: 2023 and 2024. ↩ ↩2
    
7. "The effect of top predator removal on the distribution of a mesocarnivore and nest survival of an endangered shorebird," Avian Conservation and Ecology, 16(1), 2021. ↩
    
8. Melvin, S.M., Griffin, C.R., & MacIvor, L.H. (1992). "Predator exclosures: a technique to reduce predation at piping plover nests." Cape Cod, Massachusetts (as summarized via Deblinger, Vaske & Rimmer, Wildlife Society Bulletin 20, 1992). ↩
    
9. Duxbury Beach Reservation, Conservation & Recreation on Duxbury Beach: The Role of a Predator Management Program. ↩