Visitors to Sauble Beach this year should notice a considerable difference in the northern part of the beach.
South Bruce Peninsula town staff spent last week clearing overgrown vegetation from the beach, which had not been groomed in six years.
Deputy Mayor Jay Kirkland says the Ministry of Natural Resources had banned beach grooming on the north end of Sauble since the arrival of the first nesting pair of endangered piping plovers.
Kirkland says they had been consulting with the provincial ministry to find a way to allow beach grooming again, adding the M.N.R. gave them a short window of opportunity last week before the plovers migrate north for the summer.
He says they were able to clear an area all the way north to the Sauble River.
"We've cleaned the beach right up to, I used to call it Groves Point, so it's right up to the mouth of the Sauble River, right to where the break wall was put in," says Kirkland. "We've cleaned the beach and rehabilitated it back to the nice soft sand that it used to be."
Kirkland says it was so overgrown that it had become unusable as a beach, adding they were able to clear about half of what they had hoped, as it was a time-consuming task and they were required to leave some areas untouched for piping plover habitat.
