“Canada’s Ocean Playground” has a problem. Our coastline is increasingly developed into private vacation homes and tourism attractions, while local access, traditional use, and wildlife habitat are pushed to the side. Nova Scotia has 13,000 km of coastline and sea levels are expected to rise up to one metre over the next 80 years. Over 70% of Nova Scotians live in these quickly changing coastal communities, but we aren’t alone. We share these unforgiving seascapes with an increasingly threatened biodiversity, including species like the quintessential piping plover.
The 2024 State of Canada’s Birds report estimates a national historic loss of 42% of our shorebirds since the 1980s. Residential and commercial development, ATV use, off-leash dogs, high density recreational beach use, climate change-related disturbances, and terrestrial and marine pollution all threaten coastal species and many of these threats are growing in Nova Scotia.
Over a third of the global piping plover population breeds in Canada. There are two subpopulations, one made up by the melodus subspecies on the Atlantic coast and the other by the circumcinctus subspecies in the prairies and great lakes region. The melodus population that resides in Nova Scotia and other Atlantic provinces was placed on SARA’s Schedule 1, the official list of all species at risk in Canada, in 2003, and was listed as Endangered by the Nova Scotia government shortly after. Though plovers in the Maritimes are generally fairing better than their counterparts in central Canada, with 60 breeding observed by Birds Canada’s monitoring program in 2023, there may only be 400 or so plovers, total, in the Atlantic population today.
As part of the Recovery Planning process for species like the piping plover, government must identify an area of Critical Habitat: “habitat that is necessary for the survival or recovery of a listed wildlife species.” Though this identification does not necessarily result in meaningful protection of the described habitat, as the discretion to designate Critical Habitat (or Core Habitat at the provincial level) and do something to protect it lies with the Minister, it does mean that the strategy document must recommend actions related to Critical Habitat protection, and government is responsible for completing these actions.
In the 2022 update to the federal piping plover Recovery Strategy, government adopted a “bounding box” approach to habitat identification, meaning that instead of protecting the whole beach for piping plover habitat, as was the prescription previously, only small areas that meet a certain set of criteria were recommended for protection.
The original strategy, released in 2012, identified many beaches across Atlantic Canada and Quebec as critical habitat. The new strategy only protects habitats inside the 1×1 km squares used by the bounding box method, and then only under certain biophysical attributes.
Suitable habitat includes:
sand, gravel, and/or cobble areas safe from high tide,
that are sparsely vegetated,
with elements like stones, driftwood, pebbles, or seaweed for shelter and camouflage,
with access to good foraging
The bounding box method for identifying Critical Habitat seems to have come out of the aquatic species at risk world, where, by the cryptic nature of some aquatic environments, researchers may have a more difficult time identifying habitats with greater certainty. Freshwater fish, for example, may have known habitat needs but researchers may not know exactly where along a river that habitat exists. To give these fish some protection, some recovery planning teams have opted to use the bounding box approach, essentially saying “anywhere along this river where this specific habitat exists is to be considered critical habitat.” To the scientists in our network, this might seem like a reasonable way to describe habitat (it did to us at first!), but from a scientific and, perhaps more importantly, legal perspective, the use of the bounding box approach is problematic.
For one, the use of the bounding box for identifying Critical Habitat may violate the precautionary principle, which is a decision-making approach that guides action in situations where there is a threat of serious or irreversible harm, even if scientific certainty is lacking. At first glance, it might seem like the bounding box attempts to abide by the precautionary principle, by identifying critical habitats in uncertain locations by setting out a specific definition of what that habitat looks like. In practice though, defining Critical Habitat in this way seems to suggest that on-the-ground survey work looking for this habitat should be required for any activity or development that could take place within it. Putting the responsibility for Critical Habitat identification on development proponents or the general public is a slippery slope, especially considering the relative lack of enforcement already leaving Critical Habitats at risk. Surely, the precautionary principle would have government simply identify the entire river as Critical Habitat. This problem becomes even clearer when we consider environments like beaches, which are smaller than rivers and where habitats and species presence is usually better documented. In these environments, what possible justification could there be for using the bounding box approach to identifying Critical Habitat?
Beaches change over time, sometimes dramatically. Plovers like to nest in the disturbed areas where sand and small rocks have accumulated, so when an event like Hurricane Fiona happens and that disturbed areas shifts, the plovers returning next year will move with the beach and nest in areas where there is suitable habitat. The bounding box approach attempts to protect this shifting habitat by applying its protection to anywhere that meets the appropriate habitat description, but how are developers or average beach-goers to understand this complicated habitat identification?
What happens when the biophysical attributes necessary for “suitable habitat” are pushed to a new area of the beach? Or when an inexperienced plover pair decides they’re going to nest in the less desirable gravel? How will the definition of Critical Habitat be interpreted then, when last year’s delineation is made out-of-date? What happens when a new beach resort is proposed for the area just next to this year’s suitable habitat? It may not be Critical Habitat now, but could be next year.
Are these habitats not important enough to protect from development and other stressors right now?
We aren’t the first to have concerns about the use of the bounding box approach to Critical Habitat identification. The bounding box method seems to have come from the marine and aquatic worlds, where it’s been used to describe habitat for species that, like the plover, may change how they make use of a broader area over time. In Alberta, criticism of the bounding box approach for several species of native trout has suggested that the method puts responsibility on the developer or local government to identify cryptic Critical Habitat. This, combined with lacking enforcement, makes the habitat less likely to actually be protected.
So Nova Scotia's Naturalists Went Back To Court...
We argue that this new approach makes enforcement, and consequently protection, of beach habitats more difficult and leaves unprotected areas of sandy beaches open for development and construction.
Whatever happens next, how the federal government decides to identify Critical Habitat for the Piping Plover holds concerning consequences for provincial protections too. Nova Scotia adopts Critical Habitat as outlined in in the federal strategy, in lieu of identifying our own Core Habitat. In a province where the coast already faces such high development pressure and our government has a reputation for secret public land sales, weakened federal protections for the piping plover puts the entire Atlantic population at risk.
Update - Fall 2025:
In October 2025, Birds Canada alerted staff at Nature Nova Scotia about a “beach nourishment” project underway at Dominion Beach, Unama’ki/Cape Breton Island. According to a government press release, Dominion Beach Provincial Park received a $1.1 million investment in July to support a beach nourishment pilot project and the implementation of a coastal monitoring program, to help preserve the shoreline and public access to one of the islands’ most popular beaches. Beach nourishment and beach stabilization are activities that are known to destroy critical habitat for piping plovers, clearly identified in the species’ Recovery Plan, which is the federal Recovery Strategy adopted by the province as its own Recovery Plan. When Birds Canada alerted Nature Nova Scotia to the issue, the dune habitat had been buried beneath imported cobble and dune vegetation disturbed or destroyed. Birds Canada reached out to the Department of Natural Resources and Renewables asking for information on the projects’ planning and approval, expressing shock that we also feel at government-sanctioned and funded Species At Risk habitat destruction. Asking specifically about the destruction of known Critical Habitat, the province responded by stating that while Dominion Beach was considered to be Critical Habitat, it is not protected habitat…
Serious Changes Are Needed To Protect Wildlife Habitat
The timing of the Dominion Beach disaster is ironic and frustrating, given our recent win at court with the federal government. While we wait for a more detailed response from government about the Department of Natural Resources and Renewables’ decision to destroy plover habitat, in what exactly what considered as part of the approval process, if any compensation was considered, and more, we are also strategizing around our own work for Critical Habitat protections.
It is clear that we aren’t doing enough to protect wildlife habitat in Nova Scotia. As we brainstorm potential legal actions, public education approaches, and other ways of standing up for habitat, we are encouraging our supporters to both stay informed and to donate to our Conservation Action for Birds Fund. Though initially created to raise funds for the legal costs of the Plover vs Canada judicial review last spring, having won that case and seeing how much more work there is to do to achieve meaningful conservation action for birds in Nova Scotia, we’ve decided to keep the Fund active and prioritize high impact actions benefiting birds.
