Escapes: Rebuilding Maryland’s wild islands

Stepping off the gravel road encircling Poplar Island, I walked gingerly down a small hill, salt meadow hay crunching beneath my feet.

“Keep going,” urged Laura Baldwin, our guide. “Slowly.”

I took a few more steps, and suddenly, just feet in front of us, a mallard flew up from a hidden spot in the field. Baldwin walked to where the duck had been sitting, lifted a flap of grasses and revealed a nest of nine perfect eggs. I inched closer, delighted. This wasn’t what I’d been expecting when I signed up for a tour of the island, but for our first stop, it was a good start.

Details, Maryland’s rebuilt islands

For years, when I visited Tilghman Island on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay, I’d heard about Poplar, and I knew that the critically eroded island was being rebuilt as a wildlife habitat. I’d seen it from afar by boat and had conjured up an image that wasn’t too far removed from Jurassic Park — a land thick with prehistoric plants and large, bizarre-looking animals.

But as the tour boat approached the island one morning in May, I saw minimal vegetation, long-necked excavators and dump trucks filled with earth. It was only then that I realized I knew nothing about this place, except that I’d have to relinquish my dinosaur fantasy.

Poplar Island is a work in progress, but it’s still one of the coolest free tours I’ve stumbled upon. The island, 12 miles south of the Bay Bridge, is one of several sites that Maryland is rebuilding, using material dredged from the bay’s shipping channels. To keep the shipping industry competitive, the state has to deepen the bay by an average of 21 feet to accommodate large cargo ships, which need 50 feet.

It’s an ongoing challenge to find space for the roughly 5.2 million cubic yards of sediment that Maryland dredges each year (imagine FedEx Field filled to the top 2¹ / ₂ times), but the state has come up with a clever solution: Restoration sites offer a space for the material while also providing desperately needed wintering and nesting spots for migratory and local species.

Currently, three sites offer public tours, and a fourth will open later this summer. It’s fascinating to watch the projects midstream; the engineering behind building islands and wetlands is remarkable.

On Poplar, after ogling the mallard eggs, we hopped aboard our tour van and continued driving around the boomerang-shaped island. Baldwin pointed out a thick grassy area that was part of the original Poplar.

We learned that the island once consisted of 1,100 acres and was home to about 100 residents — in the mid-1800s, there was a church, a general store and a sawmill, which ate up all the trees and helped contribute to erosion. In 1929, the national Democratic Party bought Poplar and neighboring Jefferson Island, where it built an exclusive men’s-only hunting club. Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman were among the visitors.

By the 1990s, Poplar had eroded to barely five acres. So a team of federal and state agencies, headed by the Army Corps of Engineers, the Maryland Environmental Service and the Maryland Port Administration, decided to restore it and started construction in 1998. When it’s completed, in 2039, it will include 1,715 acres of tidal wetland, upland and open-water habitat.