Lisa Franceski didn’t mean to become a shorebird photographer. But she lives on Long Island, only a half hour drive from the shore, so when she was given a DSLR camera she figured she would take it to the beach. There, she saw a New York State Department of Environmental Conservation sign with a handsome drawing of a squat little bird on it. “I didn’t even know what a Piping Plover was,” she says. That was just eight years ago, but since then Franceski has specialized in shadowing individual bird families through their New York nesting season—and in some cases, year after year. And it's all thanks to the first Piping Plover she saw, which sported colored bands from an ornithologist tracking the species’ migration. “It was a whole new world when I met Polly,” as she nicknamed the bird. She photographed Polly for four years, until the plover stopped showing up at the beach. It’s not just plovers that fascinate Franceski: She also chronicles the lives of Common...