SOUTH KINGSTOWN, Rhode Island — On a pristine Rhode Island beach teeming with noisy seabirds, a group of biologists armed with nets sneak up on a pair of American oystercatcher chicks.

But just as they close in to capture them, one of the football-sized birds, with bright orange beaks and long legs, runs toward a salty coastal pond. The other briefly rises into the air, causing the team to race across the 2.4 kilometer (one and a half mile) long beach in pursuit.

“There’s a problem. They can fly,” said Alan Kneidel, a conservation biologist with the environmental group Manomet Conservation Sciences, as he watched the team chase the chicks.

Ultimately, biologists with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service located both birds. They wrapped each of them in white pillowcases and cautiously carried them to a sand dune where their body measurements were taken and bands were placed on their long peach-colored legs.

The banding at the 787-acre (318-hectare) Trustom Pond National Wildlife Refuge is part of a national effort to restore the oystercatcher population along America’s coasts. The birds were virtually exterminated in New England in the early 20th century due to hunting and egg collecting, but their numbers are increasing.

About $10 million was raised over a decade, and 35 coastal organizations in 16 states joined the effort. Much of the campaign focused on educating beachgoers about the presence of flamboyant birds known for their piercing songs and their habit of using their sharp beaks to open oysters and mussels. Measures were also implemented to protect their ground nesting sites from predators and pets on beaches, sand dunes, mudflats or tidal deposits.

From 2008 to 2023, oystercatcher numbers increased by 45% along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Their recovery is especially significant given that a 2023 study found that most shorebird populations in North America were declining.

“It’s amazing and it’s a great conservation success story,” said Maureen Durkin, a federal wildlife biologist who led the banding effort and works at the Rhode Island National Wildlife Refuge Complex.

“It really shows how much can be achieved when there is a dedicated group of partners who can come together and identify species needs and implement conservation actions,” he said, adding that it also showed that conserving endangered species “is not easy and requires sustained and committed effort.”

Kneidel said a critical part of the conservation plan was determining that “chick survival was the most important factor driving the declines.” Custom plans were then developed from organizations in the American Oystercatcher Working Group, led by Shiloh Schulte, a conservation biologist and Manomet field scientist who died last year in a helicopter crash in Alaska while on a mission to protect shorebirds. Their initial aerial reconnaissance showed that their numbers had decreased by double digits.

“At one site it could be recreational disturbance, at another site it could be predators, at another site it could be sea level rise or loss of dune structure that is causing flooding events that are causing nests to fail,” Kneidel said as he walked along rocky Moonstone Beach, the sky filled with chirping, at least, terns.

On Martha’s Vineyard, a low chicken wire fence is seasonally installed at the entrance to a key breeding site for oystercatchers and other sea and shore birds, which has kept skunks and raccoons that eat their eggs off the beach. Colorful signs have also been installed to educate the public about oystercatchers.

The birds also benefit from federal protections given to plovers, a threatened shorebird that nests in some of the same areas. During piping plover nesting season, vehicles and dogs are limited or prohibited near beach nesting sites.

“With a little effort and attention focused on this really charismatic bird, you can teach the public how to share the coastline,” said Luanne Johnson, a wildlife biologist who founded the nonprofit BiodiversityWorks, one of the groups working on oystercatcher recovery. The island was the first oystercatcher nesting site in Massachusetts when they began to recover and has seen the number of breeding pairs increase by 77% since 2009.

In South Carolina, nearly 30 breeding sites are cordoned off to protect nesting habitat. Georgia and North Carolina also cordon off breeding sites, in addition to trapping and euthanizing predators such as foxes, raccoons and coyotes during the breeding season.

“If you concentrate conservation efforts on one species, especially before it is endangered to the point where you are considering listing it, you can avoid problems down the road,” said Lindsay Addison, a coastal biologist with Audubon North Carolina, adding that the state’s breeding pairs have increased nearly 20% to 403. Some birds, such as Dark Green 06 and Yellow 25, were banded as early as 2004 and have become minor celebrities.

Ted Simons, a retired professor emeritus at North Carolina State University who began studying the birds on North Carolina’s Outer Banks in 1995, said their recovery was a testament to the species’ resilience. He noted that American oystercatchers have been found nesting on rooftops in the United States and other oystercatcher species in Europe nest in grasses and eat worms. He recalled that a pair was found nesting in a pothole at a bus station in Iceland.

“If these were really highly specialized birds that needed an exact recipe to survive, it would have been more difficult,” Simons said. “But what we found is that these birds are incredibly adaptable.”

Despite its strong recovery, threats persist.

The main danger is climate change, which has caused sea level rise and erosion that has destroyed oystercatcher nests. That has led states like Georgia to build elevated oyster shell nesting platforms for birds and to use material dredged from shipping channels to create and maintain nesting islands. Along the Cape Fear River in North Carolina, Audubon is replenishing shell rakes, beds of old oyster shells where oystercatchers nest.

“Climate change and sea level rise are a big challenge not only for oystercatchers but for all types of interests on the coast,” Addison said. “There will be habitat loss due to sea level rise, so we need to make sure we do everything we can to provide the habitat we can so they can overcome the next bottleneck.”

There are also concerns that this month’s changes to the Endangered Species Act could affect nesting sites, especially where state protections are weak. Environmental groups, which sued Tuesday to block the changes, fear that breeding grounds could be disrupted by everything from vehicle traffic to unchecked development.

The changes would allow oil and gas drilling, mining, logging and other development in critical wildlife habitat, as long as the animals themselves are not killed or injured. Environmentalists warned that the measure could cause the extinction of some species by opening the door to habitat destruction.

“It’s a direct attack on the protections that have allowed many of these shorebird species to recover,” Kneidel said.

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