Thanks to a program initiated several years ago by the scientists and engineers of Maryland Environmental Service (MES), the quasi-public agency responsible for creating a wildlife habitat at the Chesapeake Bay’s restored Poplar Island, at least a handful of these trees have been given, if not a second life, then, at least, a second usage: to shelter and provide a nesting place for birds and other small animals.
“We’ve used as many as 300 trees some years, but we usually request about 150 of them, depending on our needs,” says Michelle Osborn, a lead environmental specialist with MES, which is in reality, one of an array of federal and state agencies and nonprofit organizations involved in the massive $1.4 billion restoration project, which is officially called The Paul S. Sarbanes Ecosystem Restoration Project at Poplar Island.
“The program was initiated with the town of Easton’s Public Works Department in 2006,” Osborne adds. “Its purpose is to provide instant cover for wildlife (on newly restored portions of the island), since it takes time for the shrub community, which naturally provides cover, to develop and mature.”
Photography courtesy Chesapeake Bay Program
During a recent tour of the island, which is located near Tilghman Island, roughly one mile from the bay’s eastern shore, nine miles from the western shore and 15 miles south of the bay bridge, MES senior environmental specialist, Kristina Motley pointed out clusters of the trees that are initially stacked in a pyramid shape. After a year or more of exposure, they tend to blend inconspicuously into the man-made natural landscape.
“They actually have become a great habitat feature,” Motley says. “Quite a few bird species perch or shelter on them, and the American Black Duck nests in them.”
The Christmas tree program is merely one relatively small component of this sweeping, multi-decade-long project that has created a vital habitat resided in or visited by more than 200 bird species as well as a variety of other critters, including the threatened Maryland Diamondback Terrapin, mice, voles and muskrats, and 155 insect species. The island is situated within the vital Atlantic Flyway, the route by which hundreds of bird species, along with Monarch Butterflies, migrate each year.
Photography courtesy Chesapeake Bay Program
Yet on an even grander scale, the restoration of Poplar Island and the vast sums of state and federal dollars and scientific expertise being devoted to it is also a practical solution to a major ongoing economic challenge: how to keep the Port of Baltimore open for business.
The port is a huge economic engine. Nearly $60 billion in cargo passes through it each year. Its operations directly or indirectly sustain more than 37,000 jobs, $3.3 billion in wages, and $395 million in state and local taxes annually.
Yet it’s shipping channels, in the harbor, the bay, and the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, must be constantly dredged to remove the sediment swept into the bay by the Susquehanna River and its many lesser tributaries. The bay’s average depth is 21 feet, while the largest cargo ships calling on the port have a 50-foot draft. To remedy this 29-foot depth discrepancy, five million cubic yards of dredge material, have to be removed every year.
The challenge is where to put all that stuff. For years, a procedure called “open placement” was used, which meant it was merely dumped somewhere else in the bay. But open placement was outlawed in 2001 after it was found to be detrimental to marine life.
Part of the alternative is the 56-year-long Poplar Island restoration (work began in 1998 and is slated for completion in 2044). It utilizes 2 million cubic yards of the nutrient-rich spoils annually to create new natural habitats in the form of wetlands and drier uplands containing a 110-acre embayment–essentially a micro-bay within the island, sheltered by breakwaters and serving as a marine habitat.
Photography courtesy Chesapeake Bay Program
Kristen Fidler, director of Harbor Development for MDOT Maryland Port Administration says the project offers the best of possible outcomes, protecting both the regional economy and the environment.
“Poplar Island has been critical to keeping the Port’s shipping lanes open, safe, and efficient by providing over 30 years of placement capacity for material dredged from the Chesapeake Bay shipping channels. Without Poplar Island as a dredged material management solution for the Port of Baltimore, the 50-foot channel and the competitive advantage it provides would have been at risk.
Photography courtesy Chesapeake Bay Program
“As stewards of the economic engine that is the Port of Baltimore, we are also stewards of the natural resources and environment upon which our operations depend,” Fidler adds. “Working with the Army Corps of Engineers and so many other partners and stakeholders, we have successfully found a way to beneficially reuse our dredged material and bring back important, scarce, remote island habitat, making a lasting impact on the health of the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem.”
This is obviously both a massive and complex effort whose partners include, along with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and MDOT Maryland Port Administration, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the biology department of the University of Ohio, and the nonprofit environmental advocacy organizations, Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay and Monarch Watch.
Photography courtesy Chesapeake Bay Program
“Poplar Island is an impressive project, mostly due to its scale and the biodiversity of the animals that can be found there,” says Kate Fritz, executive director for the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay. “It’s a testament of the collaborative impact that results when diverse stakeholders work together to address the Bay’s economic and environmental issues in innovative ways.”
In 1847, when it was first surveyed, Poplar Island comprised 1,140 acres. The family of one of its earliest European settlers was massacred there by Indians in the 17th century. Two centuries later, at the time of that first survey, it was home to roughly 100 people. There were 11 farms, as well as a church, post office, and a sawmill.
Photography courtesy Chesapeake Bay Program
But by 1993, when the first surveys for the restoration project were completed, the people were long gone. Erosion and rising sea levels had reduced Poplar to a mere five uninhabitable acres spread over four disconnected wisps of land. It was well on its way to joining the 400 or so other islands that have already vanished into history.
The selection of Poplar Island for the “beneficial reuse” of the dredge material required by statute was pragmatic rather than sentimental. It is conveniently located to the upper and middle bay channel approaches to Baltimore Harbor. And had it even been sparsely populated, the logistics of such a massive rebuild would likely have been unworkable. No one involved in the project on site currently lives on the island; they commute by boat. And when it is completed to its final size of 1,715 acres, it will remain without permanent habitation, save for the birds, butterflies, terrapins, insects, and other assorted wildlife, along with, perhaps, the scant remains of those reused Christmas trees as they naturally biodegrade back into the elements from whence they came.
