24 minute read
Up a Frozen Creek
3Winter H ere’s the plan: Take a stroll along the waterfront, visit a museum you may have missed and then try out a new waterfront restaurant. It’s Land Yacht almost like boating. Not really, but it’ll still be fun. By the way, some of Cruises the Bay’s museums and waterfront restaurants close for the winter, so I’ve tried to keep to the ones that don’t. Still, not a bad idea to call ahead.
Havre de Grace
Here’s a nice easy land cruise, with a walk along the Havre de Grace Promenade. Start at Tydings Park at the south end of Havre de Grace and walk north on the boardwalk PAT VENTURINO until you reach Concord Light. It’s not quite a mile. Along the way, be sure to stop at the Decoy Museum on Giles Street and the Maritime Museum on Lafayette Street. The Concord Point Lighthouse is Maryland’s second oldest. Since this is winter, you’ll likely find it closed, but you can still admire the view, where the flow of the Susquehanna River meets that of the tidal Chesapeake. Now gather up your forces and continue up Concord Street to Girard. Turn west two blocks and reward yourself with a double dip of strawberry with a drizzle at Bomboy’s Homemade Ice Cream at Girard and Market streets. For a nice meal and a terrific view, walk or drive up to Tidewater Grille on Franklin Street.
Cambridge
Golly, where to start? On one end of your trip or the other, you’ll want to stop at the Harriet Tubman Underground Railway National Historical Park, which is south of Cambridge on Golden Hill Road in Church Creek (not literally in the creek, of course). Then you’ll want to visit at least a few of the nearby stops along the Tubman Byway, like Bucktown General Store and Joseph Stewart’s Canal. The Byway is nearly 200 miles long, so perhaps you can save the rest for another visit. Now drive north a few miles into Cambridge itself. Here you’ll want to see the Harriet Tubman mural and the visitor center. While you are there, take a good long walk through one of the Chesapeake’s most fascinating towns. You’ll find shops, lots of good restaurants, lovely architecture and a deep and abiding connection to the Bay. If the Richardson Maritime Museum on High Street is open, by all means pay it a visit. It is dedicated to boatbuilder Jim Richardson and the many other craftsmen who have kept the area’s watermen afloat. You’ll also want to drop by Ruark Boatworks on the other side of Cambridge Creek on Hayward Street. And J.M. Clayton Seafood. Finally, stretch your legs before the trip home with a walk along the Choptank waterfront from Long Wharf Park to Great Marsh Park, just shy of a mile.
Newport News
The wonderful Mariners Museum and Park and its adjacent Noland Trail make a perfect destination for a winter land-yacht expedition because they are nearly impossible to get to by boat. Start where you like because it’s all going to be fun. The museum entrance fee is only $1, and the entrance to the park and the 5-mile-long Noland Trail is free. Follow the trail—or part of it—around the shoreline of Mariner Lake. There are more than a dozen bridges along the way, nearly all interesting with stone lions’ heads and what not. The museum itself is a wondrous mixture of displays, such as the America’s Cup exhibit, dramatic early maritime photography, a movie or two, the International Small Craft Center, the extraordinary miniature ships of August and Winifred Crabtree. And of course you’ll want to visit the definitely dazzling U.S.S. Monitor Center, which comes complete with a full-scale replica and a highdef Battle Theater with, as they put it, “unexpected loud and flashing lights.” Whew, I just used a lot of modifiers! All deserved. Now for the equally important restaurant part. The museum has its own café, naturally, but it is, unnaturally, closed at the moment, so I suggest you motor five miles south to Crab Shack on the James. I haven’t eaten there in a couple of years, but I remember that it has great views and food. It is also within easy walking distance of Leeward Municipal Marina.
1Excellent Way to Out-Wait the Wait
And now for what is probably the best over-wintering solution of them all. You’ll need no equipment at all, not your car, not your computer, not even your reading glasses. All you’ll need are a few spare moments and a good memory. Okay, it’s not perfect. I could never put it as well as essayist and lifelong sailor E.B. White (yes, the Charlotte’s Web fellow) did in his piece “The Sea and the Wind That Blows.”
He begins: “Waking or sleeping, I dream of boats—usually of rather small boats under a light press of sail.” He goes on to explain that while other men, awaiting their turn at the barber shop, pick up a magazine to read, he sits down and picks up the thread of whichever of his past boating adventures he has begun earlier. “There is hardly a waiting room in the East that has not served as my cockpit,” he writes.
And that’s the idea. Simple and nearly perfect. As you go through the motions of winter, spin out your memories. Perhaps they are of a perfect early morning motor across a pancake-fl at sea, down past Rock Hall, all the way into Solomons for dinner. Or maybe they are of a whooping-good broad reach from the Patapsco River down to Deltaville, shoved along by a 20-knot northerly and an impatient sea. What do I relive? Well, there’s that time I ran aground cutting the shoal too close south of Fernandina Beach. But there’s also that late afternoon sail with a friend in my venerable little Albin Vega 27, from the mouth of the Yeocomico River up to Breton Bay, holding her precariously wing and wing the whole way, and then ghosting her inside on a dying breeze to an anchorage o Protestant Point. Yes, that’s what I remember.
So, you see? If you do it right, boating’s not gone for the season, it’s just relocated.
CBM Cruising Editor Jody Argo Schroath, with the help and not infrequent hindrance of ship’s dogs Bindi and Sammy, goes up and down bays, rivers and creeks in search of adventure and stories.
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BY MARTY LEGRAND
As day breaks on a hazy August morning, Virginia’s barrier islands rest lightly on the horizon. Through a peach-colored dawn, they seem to float on the coastal bays they shelter. It’s not yet six o’clock and Alexandra Wilke, a coastal scientist with The Nature Conservancy, is headed to one of the southern islands to check on a late brood of piping plover chicks.
A federally endangered species, the plovers nest on pebble- and shell-covered beaches within reach of the sea and whatever predators happen to be prowling the area. A prolonged nor’easter in early May wiped out the plovers’ first nesting attempts, but eight plover couples and 27 pairs of another shorebird of conservation concern, American oystercatchers, successfully renested on the island to which we’re headed.
Wilke (Alex to friends and co-workers) guides her skiff northward through Magothy Bay near the southern tip of the Delmarva Peninsula. She or her colleagues make island trips daily during the ALEX WILKE/TNC birds’ breeding season (April to August), an intense period when the lives of biologists who monitor coastal bird populations are not their own—as I came to appreciate when I tried to reach them. Twelve-hour days are not uncommon. A few private homes and a handful of fishing shacks on stilts still dot Virginia’s barrier islands, but nearly every one of these fragile, shape-shifting strips of beach and cordgrass are protected now—some by governments, some by easements, but most under the stewardship of The Nature Conservancy as part of the Volgenau Virginia
CONSERVATIONISTS TAKE A LESSON FROM HUCK FINN
Coast Reserve, a 50-mile stretch of unparalleled coastal wilderness. As manager of VVCR’s migratory bird program, Wilke oversees habitat so vital to nesting and migrating birds that it’s part of something called the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network.
“It’s a voluntary network of important shorebird sites,” she explains as we thread a salt marsh-lined channel. “It’s completely non-regulatory, but it’s a celebration of how important this place is.”
VVCR comprises about half of what’s known officially as the Maryland-Virginia Barrier Islands Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network. An unbroken, mostly undeveloped strip of naturally dynamic land masses sculpted and re-sculpted over the years by tides and storms, the islands host hundreds of thousands of shorebirds annually. The coastline seems sultry and serene on this morning—deceptively so, because these are the front lines of an ongoing struggle for species survival.
To casual observers, the Chesapeake Bay and the Eastern Shore seem lousy with waterbirds: terns that dive for baitfish, gulls that strut the boardwalk in search of handouts. From spring to summer, these and other “beach birds” make their homes and babies along the same shores that beckon humans. But for some, it’s a precarious existence.
Rising sea levels caused by climate change threaten nesting grounds from here in southeastern Virginia to Assateague Island at the Maryland-Delaware line and beyond. So do coastal storms that have grown more frequent and more intense with global warming. Predators such as raccoons, foxes,
ZAK POULTON/TNC
Opposite page: A piping plover wades the shallows. Above: A colony of nesting royal terns in Virginia.
owls and gulls devour eggs and even young chicks. And then there’s us; our beachcombing, our dogs, our surf fishing, our boat wakes, our litter, our penchant for hardening coastlines—all have the potential to disrupt or destroy bird colonies. Wilke guides the boat past terrain barely above sea level. Though there’s little evidence around us, there were houses, hotels and hunting lodges on these islands less than a century ago. That all changed on another August morning nearly 90 years ago, when the un-named hurricane of 1933 lashed the midAtlantic coast. In less than 24 hours, the storm inundated islands, leveled an entire town, wiped out fisheries and ended the islands’ era as a tourist and sporting destination. These days, Virginia’s more than a dozen seaside islands and adjacent lagoons host other visitors: shorebirds such as plovers, oystercatchers, whimbrels and dowitchers that probe mud flats and beaches for insects and small mollusks; colonial waterbirds including gulls, terns, skimmers, cormorants and pelicans that dine on fish in near-coastal waters; and wading species such as herons, ibises and egrets that forage in muddy and marshy areas closer to shore.
We reach our destination, Myrtle Island, a speck of land that the ocean shaved from
neighboring Smith Island two centuries ago. Wilke anchors the skiff and we step ashore. Most of Myrtle’s piping plover and oystercatcher chicks have fledged, but she wants to check on a three-week-old plover and its parents. She sets up a spotting scope a respectful distance from the nest area. In no time, Wilke spies the chick’s fluffy head rising about a low dune. Sandy gray in color and plush as a little stuffed toy, the chick is— scientifically speaking—adorable. By monitoring the number of chicks each nesting shorebird pair produces, scientists can set goals for stable populations—a challenging task. Shorebirds are among the nation’s most threatened species. According to the U.S. Shorebird Conservation Plan, 31 of 57 U.S.breeding species are at grave risk, including piping plovers (“endangered”), oystercatchers (“greatest concern”) and another seasonal visitor, whimbrels (“high concern”). Myrtle Island, like many of its part-beach, mostly-marsh neighbors, is migrating westward due to sea-level rise and coastal Sandy gray in color storms, which erode beaches and smother adjacent marshes. Computer modeling by the and plush as a little Virginia Institute of Marine Science shows Myrtle has retreated at an astonishing 22 stuffed toy, the chick feet per year since 1852, losing about 44 is—scientifically percent of its area and, likely, its sand volume. Thousands of acres of critical speaking—adorable. barrier island habitat have vanished, scientists estimate. “They’re actually rolling over the marsh,” Wilke says of the islands’ retreat—bad news for shorebirds that require beachfront living. “If you’re an oystercatcher or a plover you need an open, sandy place to nest,” she says. “And piping plover access to good substrate where they can feed is huge.” The Maryland-Virginia coastal islands support populations of piping plovers, oystercatchers and federally threatened rufa red knots, all of which migrate along the Atlantic Flyway. In addition, salt marshes in the coastal bays host an estimated 40,000 whimbrels, “possibly 100 percent of the eastern population,” according to the
SOME OF VIRGINIA’S AT-RISK ISLAND BIRDS
AMERICAN OYSTERCATCHERS WHIMBREL
COMMON TERN BLACK SKIMMERS PIPING PLOVER
ROYAL TERN
Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network’s website.
Most of Virginia’s barrier islands (accessible only by boat) are open to the public for low-impact activities such as birdwatching and hiking. Through outreach, The Nature Conservancy educates visitors about the birds’ presence and how to keep from harming them. (Hard-to-spot plover nests, for example, can be trampled by anyone who strays above the tideline.) Islands where birds nest are posted with warning signs.
The outreach is neither heavy-handed nor punitive. The conservancy and its various state and federal partners want citizens to appreciate what a treasure they have. “There are birds that come here that just left South America,” Wilke says. “That’s where whimbrels and oystercatchers are ambassadors.” One of the conservancy’s most popular events is Whimbrel Watch, an annual citizen-based count of the birds conducted from the mainland.
“They stop here for three weeks to gorge on fiddler crabs and in late May they leave,” Wilke says of the birds, which travel 3,000 to 4,000 miles nonstop. “On the big flight nights, you watch hundreds and hundreds.” One year, whimbrel-watchers here counted more than 8,000.
After temporarily losing my footwear in knee-deep muck returning to the boat, we push off in search of American oystercatchers, a species close to Wilke’s heart and one on which she’s done award-winning research. (The birds were the subject of her master’s thesis at the College of William and Mary.)
If you’re a migrating shorebird, Virginia’s coastal lagoons must look like the Everglades North—expanses of green marsh bound up in twisty tentacles of clear-blue water. After 20 years at VVCR, Wilke knows these neighborhoods. Drifting up an island creek, she soon finds dozens of black-headed oystercatchers standing atop a mud flat, waiting for the ebb tide to expose their
Shorebirds are among the nation’s most threatened species. 31 of 57 U.S.-breeding species are at grave risk.
In the 1980s, 2,500 common tern pairs were breeding in Maryland, 1,500 in Chesapeake Bay and 1,000 in coastal bays. By this decade, the total was just 500 to 600.
signature meal. As they’re wont to do, many perch on one leg.
Large and strikingly marked with vivid, orangey-red bills and yellow eyes, American oystercatchers seem to be doing well in coastal Virginia, particularly here. A 2018 state-wide survey documented a 13 percent increase in breeding pairs since 2008, with a 26 percent increase in the barrier islands alone, where more than 500 pairs are now breeding. The birds’ primary threat, island predators (mostly raccoons and foxes), has been managed through trapping programs, Wilke says.
On the other hand, piping plovers are on the decline for reasons unknown. (Unlike oystercatchers, plovers nest only on barrier islands.) The Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources estimated just 183 breeding pairs were present in 2021. Regional biologists are working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to unravel the decline’s possible causes.
Shorebirds aren’t the only beach birds at risk along the Virginia-Maryland coast. Colonial waterbirds—fish-eating species that nest in large colonies or rookeries—are impacted too. They may not be as adorable as plovers, as celebrated as migrating whimbrels or as iconic as oystercatchers, but time is running out for three breeding waterbirds on Maryland’s endangered species list: black skimmers, common terns and royal terns, whose numbers have declined between 80 and 95 percent since 1985.
Citing anticipated sea level rise and ongoing erosion of islands on which the birds traditionally nest, the scientific journal Waterbirds warned back in 2007 that “resource managers should investigate any promising, even potentially novel, approaches taken to benefit seabird populations.” The remedy of choice? Restoring eroded islands with dredge spoils, a practice called nourishment. From 2013 to 2015, four such islands were created. Without renourishment, three have totally eroded. The other will be gone within a year.
Dave Brinker, a longtime ecologist for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources,
was a coauthor of the Waterbirds article. “I’ve spent 30-plus years of my career here watching these things disappear,” he says of the islands today.
And as the islands go, so go the birds. Take common terns, a medium-sized tern that nests near water on loose sand, shell or pebbles. In the 1980s, 2,500 pairs were breeding in Maryland, 1,500 in Chesapeake Bay and the remainder in coastal bays. By this decade, the total was just 500 to 600.
Several years ago, Brinker and conservationists with the Audubon Society and the Maryland Coastal Bays Program hatched an innovative (some would say oddball) solution to habitat erasure. They Huck Finned a raft covered in broken clam shells, stuck tern decoys on it (complete with a come-hither soundtrack of bird calls), towed it into a coastal bay south of Ocean City and invited the birds to roost. Twenty-three pairs nested the first year, when the raft was launched belatedly. And 155 did so in 2022, when the raft was enlarged and deployed at the start of nesting season.
“I got the idea from other people who created artificial islands,” Brinker tells me. “I was pretty certain it was going to work because it had worked in other places.” Nonetheless, the concept took two years to get from drawing table to salt water. There were design issues to address; the float needed wheels so it could be towed and stored for the winter, and its 16-foot-square segments needed to flex when assembled to absorb wave energy. Bird safety features were incorporated: outdoor carpet to cover segment gaps so chicks wouldn’t fall through, little V-shaped huts to shelter chicks from the
Clockwise from far left: A gangway allows fledgling terns to return to the raft after their practice flights; a tern chick mistakenly expects a meal from one of the raft’s decoys; adult birds rest beside one of the colorfully decorated chick shelters.
sun and plastic vegetation for habitat verisimilitude.
Two of Brinker’s colleagues—Archer Larned, a coastal bird habitat specialist with the Maryland Coastal Bays Program, and Kim Abplanalp, a tern raft field assistant and contract photographer—showed me the birds’ figurative life raft. In its 2022 iteration, the 2,300-square-foot structure (roughly half the size of a basketball court) resembled a floating avian tiki bar with its ersatz beach, neon green “plants” and chick huts colorfully painted by local school kids. Mid-raft, a mast of sorts supported two solar panels that power the raft’s safety lights, bird-monitoring cameras and a playback system for tern calls. A small ancillary raft gives fledging terns a close-by practice landing strip.
The birds chattered at us as our boat approached. Both women said they get a more hostile reception during bird-banding operations, when chicks and adults are temporarily removed from the raft and banded aboard a pontoon boat. “They’re hitting us, pulling my hair,” Larned said. The adults also let fly with, shall we say, aerial emissions, so Abplanalp has learned to wear a bicycle helmet. Thanks to banding efforts in 2021, scientists discovered that 15 tern couples returned to the raft to nest in 2022. The natural islands on which these birds once nested are mostly gone. Currently 300 to 500 pairs of common terns nest on Poplar Island in Chesapeake Bay, where material dredged from shipping channels continues to replenish the island. But when 23 tern pairs adopted the raft as home in 2021, it became the largest colony in Maryland’s coastal bays. Waterbirds disappear within a few years ALEX WILKE/TNC from islands no longer suitable for nesting. “That’s why we’re all feeling such a sense of urgency,” Abplanalp says. “If we don’t do something [like the raft], then species will abandon the area.” Which happened
KIM ABPLANALP
Clockwise from above: Kim Abplanalp (left) and Archer Larned band common terns; signs caution those visiting Virginia’s barrier islands; Maryland DNR’s Dave Brinker takes tern measurements.
KIM ABPLANALP
to Maryland’s most endangered colonial waterbird, black skimmers.
“Black skimmers and royal terns are not really able to nest successfully in coastal bays,” David Curson, director of Maryland bird conservation for Audubon Mid-Atlantic, tells me. “Disappearance of islands is a very big part of the problem. It’s the headline issue.”
Curson and Brinker are already considering construction of another $250,000 raft, this one for black skimmers and royal terns. “Something more golf club-shaped,” Brinker says of its design, with a dogleg off the main raft to accommodate both species’ nesting needs.
As successful as the concept has been for common terns, manmade rafts (which are built largely with federal funds) aren’t colonial waterbirds’ best hope. “It’s a stopgap thing,” Larned says.
Brinker, Curson and other conservationists favor a renewed—but this time sustained—program to nourish islands with material dredged by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and others. “We nourish the beach at Ocean City periodically to the tune of billions of dollars,” Brinker argues. “Creating islands with dredge material wouldn’t cost nearly as much as beach nourishment. Maybe one million dollars every five or ten years.”
Conservationists contend that creating sustainable islands in Maryland’s coastal bays is a debt long overdue. When the 1933 hurricane inundated the barrier island at Ocean City, storm surge filled the coastal bays. As the water rushed seaward again, it carved out the Ocean City inlet. Maryland proceeded to make nature’s channel a permanent fixture by dredging it and building a jetty.
“We broke the geological process that creates small islands in coastal bays,” Brinker says. “Inlets get created by storms, then sand gets moved through the inlets to create islands. When we decided to harden the Ocean City inlet and change it, we totally changed the hydrodynamics of the coastal bays.”
“We probably need at least four wellmaintained islands,” Audubon’s Curson says of spoil-built sites. Brinker envisions a hybrid approach to maintaining them, protecting their most wave-vulnerable shore with riprap while encouraging sloping beach elsewhere. But island-building has its detractors, even among environmentalists. “They get all bent out of shape about taking bay bottom,” Brinker says. Dredging bottom disturbs submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV), where crabs and small fish live. “I’m talking about a couple of acres of SAV in thousands of acres of bottom. These are endangered species,” he says of at-risk colonial waterbirds. “SAV is not listed as endangered.”
So, which stands a better chance of survival: the piping plovers of Myrtle Island’s rapidly retreating sands in Virginia, or the common terns living on a raft in Maryland’s Sinepuxent Bay? Difficult to say, but Brinker argues that when it comes to coastal birds, islands are essential habitat.
“Humans can no longer sit back and say Mother Nature can take care of herself,” he says in advocating for spoil islands. “Otherwise, we’re going to lose a lot of these colonial nesting waterbirds. The handwriting is on the wall.”
KIM ABPLANALP
Maryland native and award-winning contributor Marty LeGrand writes about nature, the environment, and Chesapeake history.
JACK WILDLIFE
CHESAPEAKE ADVENTURES
They’re Back!
by Angus Phillips
Ican’t remember the year, or even the decade for sure, but it was probably the early 1990s when it dawned on me and my mates that we were hurrying across the
Bay Bridge in the predawn dark to hunt wild Canada geese on the Eastern Shore, while folks from over there were racing the other way to hunt a tamer version of the same species in the D.C. suburbs. It was our introduction to the modern phenomenon of “resident geese,” the happy honkers that luxuriate on golf courses and lawns all year, getting fat on abundant public and private grass lots, pooping on sidewalks, roosting and nesting along suburban ponds and creeks with little fear of predators or hard times.
It’s an easy life, compared to the challenges of Atlantic flyway migratory geese—the lean, wary, hauntingly beautiful birds that follow timeless tradition, flying 1,200 miles north to Canada’s barren Ungava Peninsula each spring to lay eggs in shallow nests. They raise their young on the tundra amid foxes and birds of prey, then fly south each fall with the surviving little ones to feed in fields of winter wheat and leftover grain from Delaware to Virginia and points beyond.
Fifty years ago, the Eastern Shore of Maryland was so loaded with these acrobatic migrants it was advertised as the “Goose Capital of the World,” and waterfowlers traveled from distant states and foreign lands to take a crack at them.
Well, things change in the natural world, if you hadn’t noticed. Nobody knows for sure the relative numbers of resident vs. wild geese wintering here today; the cousins look pretty much the same and they intermingle freely.
Migratory geese
[mī-grə-ˌtȯr-ē gēs]
So counting anything more than goose heads in the winter is tough. But summer counts, when migrants are away, show that residents have gained a lot. The population rose steadily and seems to have hit a plateau at about 1 million birds in the coastal states from Virginia to New England.
That figure comes from a guy who knows: Bill Harvey, chair of the Canada Goose Committee of the Atlantic Flyway Council, a consortium of 17 states and Canadian Provinces. Harvey, who also heads Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources Game Bird Division, has been watching geese come and go since 1989, when he joined DNR after graduate studies at Cornell. And while he has no beef with the booming resident goose population, like me he much prefers the wild birds from up north, whose habits and haunts he knows from personal experience. From 1993 to 2019, he spent two weeks every May wandering the tundra, monitoring ups and downs of migratory Canadas. It was a bumpy ride for him, flying close to the ground in a little amphibious airplane with his Canadian counterpart, and for the geese, whose numbers soared and plummeted depending on the weather.
Harvey has seen the best of times, when he counted 180,000 nesting pairs on the Ungava, which borders Hudson Bay. And he’s seen the worst, in the mid ’90s, when numbers dropped to 34,000 nesting pairs and almost no young were hatched during a miserable, freezing late spring.
In 1995, faced with plummeting numbers, Maryland slammed the door on migratory goose hunting after two decades of abundance. From goose seasons lasting 90 days, with a limit of three birds a day for hunters, the state went into a five-year moratorium, in hopes it would keep the wild geese from disappearing for good.
