Published July 13, 2010

Try sharing the sand with these guys. (AP)

You might think the tiny piping plovers of Plymouth are a big controversy. But you’ve never met the seals of my hometown San Diego.

They may look cute, but it was a hostile takeover. In the 1990s, scores of harbor seals staged an occupation of the “Children’s Pool” in La Jolla Cove. The historic stretch of beach was once a place for schoolchildren on field trips to play with starfish. After the seals took over, kids weren’t allowed in. No humans were.

The ensuing legal saga has lasted almost two decades. Activists have sued to open up the beach for recreation, and friends of the seals have fought to protect their adopted home. Judges have ruled, overruled and ruled again. It’s political suicide to take a stand on the seals. In the meantime, the spot has become a tourist Mecca.

So it’s hard for me, a San Diegan who covered the seal saga, to take Plymouth’s controversy too seriously. After all, in San Diego it’s seals vs. children, two of nature’s cutest things. Here in Massachusetts, it’s plover versus Hummer.

Beachgoers can’t drive SUVs across certain stretches of sand for a few months a year, to protect the defenseless one-ounce birds from being crushed.

It's Hummer vs. Plover in Plymouth. (Photos by TravOC and auburnxc/Flickr

“The birdies and their nests have taken over the beach,” said Karen Fantasia, of Plymouth.

Um… These birdies — brown-and-white cotton balls with orange toothpick legs, as David Boeri calls them — are hardly taking over. Try sharing the beach with a belching 200-pound sea mammal.

But some people in Plymouth really see these birds as a threat to their human rights. Rich Whelpley started a Facebook page to “take back the beach.”

“You’ve got to make a decision. We care about the wildlife. We care about the people. Do we care about them equally?” Whelpley said. “Or do we say: People aren’t important, they can do something else, this beach is for the birds?”

No comment, Mr. Whelpley, except that people aren’t endangered.

In San Diego, the humans have a good case. The beach is for the kids. In Plymouth, the beach is for the cars?

The plover protesters need a new angle. A suggestion: Piping plovers are illegal immigrants who have better beach access than the taxpaying residents of Plymouth.

Discuss.