On Friday evening, less than three hours before the annual “Stars Over Montauk” fireworks show was set to begin, the Montauk Chamber of Commerce announced on its social media accounts that the event had to be postponed until Sunday due to “unforeseen circumstances,” but a follow-up post the next day announced that the show would be postponed indefinitely.
The cause, the chamber said, was a nesting piping plover — a small, federally threatened shorebird considered endangered in the State of New York — that had “made itself known” at the launch site during a check of the location before the pyrotechnics show that evening.
“I don’t know if anyone’s ever seen a piping plover nest, but it’s incredibly hard to spot,” Leo Daunt, the owner of Daunt’s Albatross Motel and the president of the Montauk Chamber of Commerce’s board of directors, said on Monday. “It was just three little eggs that were nestled in a little bit of sand. They look like rocks until you examine them really closely.”
“This would be the first documented breeding record of a piping plover in Montauk,” Brent Bomkamp, the co-compiler of the Audubon Society Christmas Bird Count in Montauk, said in a text Wednesday. “There are far fewer records of piping plover in Montauk at any time of year, let alone the breeding season, than nearby areas with more expansive sandy beaches like Napeague.” Last week, officials closed the vehicle access to the ocean beach at Napeague State Park after finding plover nests there.
Common before the 1890s, piping plovers’ “numbers were severely depleted by large-scale hunting, but, with full protection by 1913 . . . had recovered strongly by the 1920s,” John Bull wrote in “Birds of New York State,” published in 1974. “In recent years, it has disappeared from the more disturbed areas where an ever increasing human population has driven it to remoter localities, such as Fire Island and Gardiner’s Island.”
State bird atlas data from 1980 and 2000 show no records of piping plovers from Montauk, Mr. Bomkamp said.
Good news for the plovers, not so much for the organizers of the fireworks display.
Mr. Daunt received a call notifying him of the discovery around 3 p.m. on Friday, he said, and for the next three hours the chamber worked to explore “every viable location” that could conceivably allow for the show to go forward that night, including a barge. “It is a tradition that has been happening for years and years in Montauk, and we love the fireworks, and so many kids and families come out for it. It was really devastating to us that we might have to cancel it.”
By 6:30 p.m., all alternate locations had been ruled out, and the chamber made the decision to cancel the show, with a hope that it would be able to identify a new location by Sunday.
“We went back to the drawing board, and again, it was a holiday weekend,” Mr. Daunt continued. “It was very hard to get in touch with all of the partners that were needed to issue a permit. So we worked on it all day and into the night on Friday, and then all day on Saturday, and again got to the point where we said, ‘you know what, this is just not possible.’ “
“In the end, the operator [Fireworks by Grucci] notified the organizers that they were not going to proceed at any other site without permits. Getting state permits at 4 p.m. on 4th July weekend is not feasible,” East Hampton Town Councilman Tom Flight, who lives in Montauk, posted on social media over the weekend. “It was a chain of events no one expected, and while not the desired outcome, I appreciate the hard work of the town teams and Chamber of Commerce in trying to find a solution in the short time they had.”
Though the board is not yet sure of the timeline, Mr. Daunt said that the chamber will “definitely” be putting on the show it had planned with Fireworks by Grucci in 2025, and expects that it will be able to finalize a date “over the next few weeks to a month.”
“We need to wait until the piping plovers fully fledge in order to safely be able to do it within three-quarters of a mile of the original site,” he said. “So once that happens, I think we can go back to that beach and consider what the best possible date is to do the show. There are a lot of people that we need to coordinate with in order to make that decision, and none of us want to make that decision in a vacuum.”
“The stars over Montauk fireworks celebration is something that has become beloved by the community of Montauk and also by my family,” Councilman David Lys said in a text Wednesday. While he was disappointed that they were canceled, he said that “the environmental factors that proceeded Grucci’s final decision to postpone the fireworks were valid and paramount. We will move forward as a community and learn from this situation for future events.”
The East Hampton Fire Department saw its Fourth of July fireworks displays at Main Beach upended by nesting piping plovers so many times that it eventually opted to change the date of the annual show to avoid the uncertainty and last-minute cancellations. For years, it has instead staged the display toward the end of the summer. This year’s show is set for Aug. 16.
On Saturday, fireworks fans have two options: the Great Bonac Fireworks Show over Three Mile Harbor, put on by the Clamshell Foundation, or the Shelter Island Fireworks at Crescent Beach. Both will go off after dark and both have Sunday rain dates.
With Reporting by Christopher Gangemi and Carissa Katz
