Boy Scout Helps Direct Mill Creek Cleanup

Teen Looks to Mobilize Neighbors to Raise Oysters

A 13-year-old Boy Scout from Lusby has taken on a hefty project for his Eagle Scout award: getting about 100 of his neighbors mobilized to help clean Mill Creek.

Calvin Davies, who will begin ninth grade at Patuxent High School this fall, is organizing nearly 50 property owners on Mill Creek to raise nearly 250,000 baby oysters in cages suspended in the water from piers.

Oysters "are an important part of our environment, and they have been depleted," said Davies, who lives on the creek.

"I can see [the water quality] is not where it should be," he said.

Through science fair projects and environmental field trips, Davies said, his interest in oysters, the bay's natural filters, grew. He and his father met members of the Patuxent River Chapter of Coastal Conservation Association Maryland (CCA-MD) in September at the Patuxent River Appreciation Days event. They learned the group needed creek captains to recruit and organize volunteers to raise baby oysters, called spat.

Davies took on the Mill Creek job, the largest oyster-raising project the chapter has done. Davies, scouts from Troop 427 and CCA-MD members distributed 250 cages Saturday to volunteers.

But Davies's planning began much earlier. By March, he had created and delivered pamphlets to mailboxes along the 1.5-mile creek. He made charts of 200 suitable piers and drew up lists of homeowners who might volunteer. He prepared hundreds of pages of documents for his final Eagle Scout report.

In April, Davies conducted a PowerPoint presentation for homeowners, explaining how oysters can filter the waterway and what his neighbors would need to do. The majority of people who attended the meeting signed up. Through word of mouth, the number of volunteers grew. "People were psyched, too. There is great local interest," said Christopher Davies, Calvin Davies's father, a troop committee chairman and an Eagle Scout. He encouraged his son "to think big" for his project.

Scott McGuire, president of the CCA-MD Patuxent River Chapter, said the organization received a $25,000 grant from the Dominion Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Dominion Resources, which paid for Davies's project and other CCA-MD oyster-raising efforts.

CCA-MD, a recreational fishing group that has several similar projects in Southern Maryland, is partnering with the governor's Marylanders Grow Oysters project to put more cages in the water, McGuire said.

McGuire said people have been encouraged by Calvin's enthusiasm. "We set out a goal of hitting 60 households with Calvin, and I'm pretty sure he met that," he said.

Davies and volunteers from Troop 427 worked Saturday at K.B. Derr and Son Marina in Lusby to fill cages with spat and distributed them by truck or boat to neighborhood volunteers, using a grid Davies created. He also has developed a monthly maintenance schedule for volunteers.