Reunited and it feels so good.
Monty and Rose were a pair of Piping Plovers looking for love.
Last year, the couple met for the first time on a romantic evening spent on the Chicago shoreline. Taking a page out of every other romance novel you’ve ever read, the two hit if off immediately. Soon later, the lovebirds decided to settle down right there on the shoreline and, soon after that, consummated their love, producing two offspring.
It was the first time two Piping Plovers had nested in Chicago since 1955.
After ample nesting of the baby birds, Monty and Rose flew the coop. The two had stayed together for the kids, but then, with an empty nest, the two saw no (biological) reason to remain with one another.
An empty nest drove them apart, Monty was said to have spent the cold season somewhere down on the Texas coast, while Rose stretched her wings in Florida. They were a thousands miles away from one another that winter.
But you know what they say: “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”
By spring the two were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and, just recently, were sighted back together at the coastal scene where it all began: Montrose Beach.
“Monty and Rose survived the winter and their long migration, and returned to this one place in the world. It’s so amazing,” Montrose Beach steward, Leslie Borns, told NPR.
It didn’t take long before the sparks were re-ignited. Soon after reuniting the lovebirds were said to have been “engaging in courtship behavior” — nice.
In 1986, the piping plovers were federally listed as endangered and threatened. “In recent decades, piping plover populations have drastically declined, especially in the Great Lakes,” according to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Services.
Their return gives conversationalists hope that the numbers of Piping Plovers in the Great Lakes are back on the rise. The two birds are now protected to make sure their eggs hatch without outside threats.
[Featured image: @chicagoparks]