Almost two dozen visitors from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Haiti and the Philippines braved temperatures in the nineties Monday to visit the Phillips Wharf Environmental Center to learn about the Center’s Chesapeake Bay conservation and biodiversity efforts, as well as its community outreach initiatives.
Armed with cameras and questions, PWEC’s visitors were hosted by the U.S. State Department’s International Visitors Leadership Program. They represented not only government agencies, but also universities and nonprofit organizations like the World Wildlife Fund, The Nature Conservancy, Jordan’s Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature, the Sustainable Development Institute, and the East Africa Natural History Society. One, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, was an environmental journalist. Their stops in Maryland, which included nearby Poplar Island and the Jugbay Wetlands Sanctuary in Lothian, were organized by the World Trade Center Institute in Baltimore.
Blistering temperatures notwithstanding, all the visitors toured the Fishmobile, for it was unlike anything any of them had ever seen before. “It is an innovation,” said Jonathan Wonkezee Yeah of Liberia. There is no such thing in her native Iraq, according to Hana Ahmed Ridha. “We only have bookmobiles.”
The delegation was welcomed by Gary Crawford of Tilghman, a member of PWEC’s board of directors. He explained that only here on the Chesapeake Bay are commercial fishermen known as “watermen.” Crawford told them that when the first Europeans saw the Chesapeake they called it La Bahia del Madre de Dios, or the Bay of the Mother of God — both for its beauty and because it was teeming with wildlife. Oyster bars, for example, reached from the bottom of the Bay to its surface. Native Americans could wade out and harvest the tasty bivalves by hand. “Archeologists have found discarded shells 30 feet deep in places,” he said.
PWEC was founded in 2005, after Hurricane Isabel demolished the Phillips Wharf crab shack. Rather than rebuild their crabbing shanty, Executive Director Kelley Cox and her husband, Jerry, decided to turn the waterfront site into an environmental education center, featuring touch tanks (“The children love this,” said Crawford) and a conservation garden. Its mission is to “close the circle,” linking watermen, residents, scientists and environmental educators in a mutually beneficial community project, one that will preserve Tilghman Island’s maritime heritage by promoting sustainable commercial fishing and enabling today’s and tomorrow’s watermen to “follow the water,” as they say on Tilghman.
Two women with horseshoe crab: Intan Sarah Dewi Ritonga of Indonesia (left) looks on as Enkhtuvshin Shiilegdamba of Mongolia gets to know a horseshoe crab at the Phillips Wharf Environmental Center.
“We know we can’t save the Bay by ourselves,” Crawford conceded. He noted that the Bay is huge and complex and PWEC is very small. The Chesapeake watershed is 65,000 square miles and spans eight states. “Some might say it’s like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon, but we’re committed to doing what we can. We’ll be here working at it with our teaspoon.”
Carol McCollough, PWEC’s Vice President and Scientific Director, then stepped to the makeshift podium . An authority on oysters and oyster diseases, she explained the Center’s role in the Tilghman Island Grows Oysters program, a “citizen-based restoration project.” About 340 cages containing oyster spat are distributed annually to 85 waterfront property owners in the Harris Creek Oyster Sanctuary, who place the cages, which protect the baby oysters from predators, in the water alongside their docks for nine months. “They’re doing something hands-on to save the Bay,” said McCollough. Last year 340 cages yielded an estimated 220,000 oysters, which were then distributed to oyster bars around the Bay.
One of the international visitors asked McCollough if oysters crowd out other species of marine life. “On the contrary,” she answered, “oysters create and enhance habitat for a wide variety of species.”
McCollough noted that the main threat the Chesapeake Bay’s oysters, aside from past overharvesting, is a protozoan parasite called derma. Its prevalence varies from year to year, depending on the amount of rainfall. Another disease, MSX, was once a scourge of the Bay’s oyster population, but has lost most of its sting due to the low salinity of the water in recent years.
Kelley Cox then took over. “I’m the education guru and the keep-the-animals-alive person,” she said. Cox described the Center’s various educational initiatives, including the Fisheries Management Program for students in grades 7-9; and the Oyster Restoration Program, which takes younger students out on skipjacks to learn about oysters and their place in the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem. She spoke of PWEC’s desire to restore three-dimensional oyster bars.
The international visitors had time to peruse the many aquaria in the Environmental Center, after which Cox and McCollough took them outside to explore the touch tanks, where they handled and photographed horseshoe crabs, white perch, spot, and jimmies and sooks—male and female Maryland blue crabs. Cox explained the medicinal uses of horseshoe crab blood, pointed out that the females carry 80,000 eggs, and told her listeners about an international horseshoe crab education program called “Green Eggs and Sand.”
“We also take our show on the road,” explained Cox, as she escorted visitors out to the parking lot to see the Center’s unique Fishmobile, a converted bookmobile that PWEC volunteers use to take marine life to schools and other sites from Rockville to Ocean City. Blistering temperatures notwithstanding, all the visitors toured the Fishmobile, for it was unlike anything any of them had ever seen before. “It is an innovation,” said Jonathan Wonkezee Yeah of Liberia. There is no such thing in her native Iraq, according to Hana Ahmed Ridha. “We only have bookmobiles.”
Before the visitors left the island, Cox and Crawford showed them the Harrison Oyster Company property beside the Tilghman Bridge, which will be PWEC’s future and much larger home. Though PWEC is still raising money to purchase the property, its staff and volunteers already have planted a rain garden, the vanguard of a planned Conservation Landscaping Program, at the site. And in April, more than three dozen volunteers cleaned up tons of garbage and debris during the annual Project Clean Stream event. Planned improvements include not only a conservation landscaping project, but also a new environmental education center, an aquaculture training center and a seafood buying, processing and marketing facility.
Woman with small fish in hand: PWEC Vice President and Scientific Director Carol McCollough shows the Environmental Center’s visitors a spot, which are good to eat but nowadays are used mainly for bait.
Crawford noted that the Phillips Wharf Environmental Center is unique in that it combines environmental education with economic development. “The people involved in both fields,” he said, “do need to be working together and we can help make that happen here.” The expanded Center will create jobs, not only by training and buying from working watermen, but also by employing oyster shuckers, fish cleaners and crab pickers, as well as environmental experts and instructors.
As the sun moved westward in the late-afternoon sky, the visitors from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Haiti and the Philippines returned in their air-conditioned bus to the western shore, and Cox and her colleagues returned to doing their part to save the Bay – one teaspoonful at a time.
By Peter Howell
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James Cliff Haddaway says
Good luck on new location. Keep up the good work so our younger people can continue to work the waters of the Chesapeake.