"Piping Plover Tastes Like Chicken" goes the bumper sticker occasionally sighted on the East End of Long Island.
Because Breezy Point hadn't been hit by a storm of Sandy's magnitude for decades, piping-plover habitat there had shrunk.
The piping plover is protected in many Atlantic Coast states, but the issue on Fire Island is particularly acute in the aftermath of Sandy.
In recent years, Breezy Point has seen between 10 and 15 plover nests each year, with about four eggs per nest and one fledged chick.
Sean Mahar, director of government relations for Audubon New York, said environmentalists have seen increases in the plover population since protection laws were instituted in the mid-1980s.
Such flow levels were a reproductive cue for spawning fish and produced sandbars that served as vital nesting grounds for shorebirds, particularly the least tern and piping plover.
English Nature, the government's wildlife advisory group, says the super-port will have a detrimental effect on birds such as brent geese, oystercatchers, ringed and grey plover, curlew, lapwing and teal.
She said most homeowners do not begrudge laws protecting the plover, a compact, pale shorebird with coloring that makes it all but vanish against the open sand flats where it nests.
Contractor crews are scrambling to get the trash removed by the end of March, before truck access is severely restricted to protect the nesting areas of the endangered bird species known as the piping plover.
Then there will be a chance for everyone to sit down and focus on the real issue, which is not whether to kill or translocate hedgehogs, but to see how to improve the breeding success of the dunlin and ringed plover on the Uist islands.
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