It’s a drizzly morning at Savage Neck Dunes Natural Area Preserve in Cape Charles as Shannon Alexander sets out to scout for northeastern beach tiger beetles.
The weather is the first challenge for finding these sand-burrowing beetles, which are historically intertwined with Virginia’s beaches but now under threat.
They like to emerge in the hot sun, said Alexander, coastal region steward for the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation’s Natural Heritage Program.
Then there’s another obstacle. A tree has fallen across one side of the beach, blocking a beetle hotspot.
Alexander isn’t optimistic about seeing them this morning, one of many she’s spent searching for them over the years.
But the skies clear a little. Alexander walks to the other side of the shoreline and finds some buzzing around a pile of eelgrass.
“Good job guys; you’re so resilient!”
They’re tiny but distinct.
“They're kind of like this pearly white sand color with these black swirls that look very artistic," she said, “like somebody could have painted them.”
These beetles are among many threatened species the Natural Heritage Program monitors across 66,000 acres of protected land in Virginia.
Northeastern beach tiger beetles were once abundant along coastal beaches throughout the Northeast, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Now, they can only be found in parts of Massachusetts and around the Chesapeake Bay. (Officials are currently working to re-establish a population in New Jersey.)
“We're very responsible for this species, because most of its range is now limited to the Chesapeake Bay beaches in Virginia,” Alexander said.
The subspecies has been federally listed as threatened since 1990, meaning it’s likely to become endangered within the foreseeable future. In the three decades since, the population has plummeted even more.
The northeastern beach tiger beetle is “picky about its habitat,” Alexander said. It needs wide, undisturbed, sloped sandy shorelines.
At night or during the winter, the beetles can take shelter in the dunes. They come out to forage between the high and low tide lines. Adult beetles mate and lay eggs in the summertime and die shortly afterward. Their larvae spend two years burrowed into sand before emerging as adults and restarting the process.
The protected Savage Neck preserve is one of few remaining places for the beetles to live. But even here, they’re declining. In the early 2000s, state officials would count as many as 7,500 adult beetles. Now, the summer counts typically yield no more than 1,500.
The drop is easy to visualize. Over the past few years, the beach has disappeared at an alarming rate.
The preserve lost more than 4 acres of globally rare dune habitat since 2009, and the beach line receded by more than 20 feet just since last year, Alexander said.
Waves are getting closer to the forested edge, squeezing the beetles’ dune habitat.
“That is due to sea level rise and erosion, and that's happening all over the Chesapeake Bay beaches,” she said.
Another contributing factor is hardened shoreline infrastructure, such as bulkheads and revetments.
A 2025 study by Randolph-Macon College looked at about 120 shoreline stabilization projects along the bay in Virginia and Maryland. It showed that long-term, many of these structures fail to stop or can even hasten the narrowing of sandy beaches.
“All structures cause erosion somewhere,” the authors wrote. “The only difference is where the erosion occurs and the lateral extent.”
Alexander’s job is to document what’s happening. Each summer, she and her team count the creatures at state-managed beetle habitats, such as Savage Neck and Parkers Marsh on the Eastern Shore and Bethel Beach on the Middle Peninsula.
At low tide, they slowly walk along the beach with a manual clicker and press down each time they see a beetle, in 100-meter increments.
“It’s not very high tech,” Alexander said.
She’s learned some best practices, such as: Stop moving, and the beetles will too, making them easier to count. Their flight patterns are unique, with short, quick movements close to the ground.
For most people, the beetles are easy to miss. But they’re important indicators of the health of beaches, Alexander said.
“If a shoreline isn't suitable for a northeastern beach tiger beetle to call home, then it's also not a suitable place that we like to go enjoy. It's not a place that diamondback terrapins are going to come out of the brackish water and lay their eggs. It's not a good place for nesting birds.”
Another selling point for the beetle is, she said: It doesn’t bite humans, but it eats the bugs that do.
The Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation is hosting "Beaches and Beetles" events, for the public to visit and learn about the species, on Sunday, July 11 at Bethel Beach Natural Area Preserve, and Thursday, July 23 at Savage Neck Dunes. Learn more on the DCR website.
