TO GIVE READERS THE most thorough comprehension of the Chesapeake Bay, I practice the Great Blue Heron method of reporting.
That means progging and prying, as the bird does, into every cranny of the shoreline, alert to every minnow, unblinking eyes never far from water and muck.
But it also means sometimes soaring so high that the intricate schemes of land and water coalesce into something whole and connected -- a watershed.
The latter had me up recently in a small plane, flying the upper reaches of Eastern Shore rivers in Maryland and Delaware with biologist Nick Carter.
We were looking at a feature in the landscape so humble and ubiquitous that ground travelers on Delmarva seldom notice it, though it defines the peninsula as profoundly as mountains characterize Colorado.
We were looking at agricultural drainage ditches (for yesterday's front-page story in The Sun on how these waterways affect the bay).
Without a "heron's eye" view, one can't comprehend how much the natural drainage systems of Shore rivers, from the Chester south to the Pocomoke, have been straightened, widened and extended for farm drainage.
We were aloft for two hours, covering hundreds of square miles, but natural, meandering stream channels were hard to find.
From farm drainage-ways small enough to straddle, to big collector ditches, a few large enough to float a cabin cruiser, Delmarva is riven with thousands of miles of ditches.
These enable a bounteous agriculture across much of the low-lying peninsula's original wetlands. Increasingly, rural roads and housing sprawling out into the countryside also depend on the artificial draining of the landscape to avoid flooding.
Increasingly we are having to recognize the resulting problems, as farm soils and the ground water beneath them have become saturated with poultry manure and other fertilizers, creating a pollutant-laden runoff to the bay.
By dramatically altering the natural hydrology, speeding the flow of water off the land, bypassing or eliminating the natural filtration of swamps and forests, the drainage network has created a rapid delivery system to the bay for whatever we apply to the lands of its watershed.
Carter, an Eastern Shore resident and veteran of Maryland's Department of Natural Resources, was a voice in the wilderness as he tried to call attention to ditching's downside a quarter-century ago.
