For Fragile Md. Isle, Help From Holiday Past

"This is all that was left of Poplar," said Chris Guy, a Fish and Wildlife Service biologist. He had stopped his truck beside a low patch of marshland the size of a couple of football fields.

But 10 years into the reconstruction of the island, the patch is surrounded by land, not open water.

Acres upon acres of mud, dredged to clear the approach channels to Baltimore's harbor, have been dumped on Poplar Island as part of a multimillion-dollar state and federal project. The island is now filled out to a crescent-moon shape, reaching something close to its original footprint.

Scientists want to create marsh and forest habitats on Poplar Island and make it a haven for birds. But the island's plants are still growing, so much of the island looks more like a barren, dusty construction site.

This is where the Christmas greenery comes in: The trees are botanical placeholders, stand-in shrubbery.

Scientists first got the idea to use them last year and brought over more than 300 trees, many donated by nurseries and Fish and Wildlife Service employees. Their plan was to give the island's birds and small mammals a thicket of branches where they could hide from such predators as marsh harriers and short-eared owls.

"What this does is, it provides cover," Mendelsohn said. Among the Christmas trees, he said, birds "can hide. They can nest in there, [which is important] because we really don't have a lot of trees there."

And the plan seems to be working. On one recent day, McGowan, of the Fish and Wildlife Service, stopped at one of last year's piles of Christmas trees. He pulled one up, revealing a grayish oval in the mud and marsh grass underneath.

"There's an egg here from a past nest," McGowan said.

Although the mallard duckling inside it did not hatch, McGowan said, the egg's presence was still a good indication that ducks felt comfortable there. He said one survey found that at least 90 percent of the Christmas tree piles had been inhabited by mallards, black ducks, mice, voles and other animals. Bald eagles have even been spotted perching on them.

McGowan said he would like to bring Christmas trees out to the island for perhaps the next five or six years, until the foliage has grown thick enough to provide the same kind of cover.

On this cold morning, the scientists brought out about 160 trees, donated by the trash collection agency in Easton. After ferrying them from Tilghman by boat, then hauling them across the island in a pickup truck, Guy and Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Carolyn Kolstad dragged four trees the last few feet by hand.

They arranged the trees into a three-foot-plus mound, a holiday-green pile in the middle of a gray-brown winter marsh. It looked like nothing the Grinch would ever have done.

"Aww," Guy said, mock-proud. "That's beautiful."