Estuary

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration wants to spend more than $56 billion to conserve farmland over the next decade, prompting an unprecedented push by Chesapeake Bay advocates to carve out a slice of the money for the imperiled estuary. Lawmakers and environmentalists say that negotiations on this year's wide-ranging farm bill - better known for the subsidies historically provided to corn and sugar growers, among others - offer the best chance yet to protect the threatened waterway from contaminants flushed in from fertilizer and manure.

TODAY marks the 500th appearance of this weekly column, more than a decade of analyzing what's right and wrong with the Chesapeake Bay. This columnist still "awakens every morning, torn between a desire to change the world, or just to enjoy it," as essayist E.B. White wrote of himself. That will be the case if the column lives to be 1,000. Much remains of this bay that is fishable, swimmable and beautiful. Last week I paddled in perfect solitude past colonies of pelicans and terns and skimmers, hooked a fat rockfish from the marsh edge for dinner around sunset, and scored two soft shell crabs from a local waterman to go with it. Who would want to change that?

BERKELEY TOWNSHIP, N.J. -- Chris Smith and David Friedland are poking holes in the perfectly manicured lawn of Constantine Afansief's home 10 miles west of Barnegat Bay, in Ocean County, N.J. Row upon row of compact new homes line the street. Each was carved out of uplands once thick with pine trees and hardwoods. After the trees were ripped out, the topsoil was scraped and covered with sod. To the untrained eye, the lawn appears perfect. Yet when Smith tries to force a slim metal rod into the grass, to measure its ability to drain, the rod resists after an inch or two. "The soil is really compact here," says Smith, a soil scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

With only seven days left until Christmas, 6-year-old Gabriel Webster still wasn't sure yesterday what presents he wants. But if you ask him about his favorite bird, it's a no-brainer - the penguin. "I like them because they waddle," Gabriel said, collecting sticks and trying to keep pace with the 11 other people looking for birds in the woods of the Otter Point Creek nature reserve. Gabriel, of Bel Air, was one of six children who participated yesterday morning in the "Bopping with the Birds" event at the Anita C. Leight Estuary Center, where they mimicked the movement of birds to music before going into the Harford County woods to try to spot them.

A day after a California company withdrew plans to bury more than 300 miles of fiber-optic cable under the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries, Gov. Parris N. Glendening effectively quashed any approval of the plan during the remainder of his term. In a pointed letter to state and federal regulators yesterday, Glendening said the plan would set an "unacceptable precedent" and told officials of the Maryland Department of the Environment and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that Clear- Stream Communications Inc. of Sacramento should consider other options.

IT'S often said, and true, that even the best efforts to repair Chesapeake Bay can never restore the place as it was when Capt. John Smith first explored and charted it in 1607. Indeed, Smith's words, "Heaven and earth never agreed better to frame a place for man's habitation," have come almost to haunt us. Human inhabitation of the bay's six-state watershed grew to about 8 million between 1607 and 1950, then nearly doubled, to 15.7 million during the past 50 years. About a million more each decade are projected to swell the ranks.

Popular Annapolis disc jockey Michael A. Buckley set out three years ago to do a weekly radio show on the Chesapeake Bay, but he wasn't interested in talking about water quality tests or the latest government study on the bay's health. He wanted to tell the stories of people who lived near, worked on and loved the bay- the tugboat captains, backyard environmentalists and crabbers. The result - "Voices of the Chesapeake Bay" - is nearly 30 hours of interviews, portions of which have been aired on Buckley's "Sunday Brunch" show on WRNR-FM, and two CD compilations.

In the early to mid-1990s, while studying landscape design at the University of Maryland, College Park and environmental sciences at what was then Salisbury State College, Jayson Meyers grew plants in ponds in his mother's back yard in Cub Hill. That led to a mail-order nursery business. Today, Meyers is president of Wayfarer Aquatic Nurseries Inc., a three-employee business in Perry Hall that provides wetland plant materials, dune and tidal area restoration, bio-engineering, pond management and consulting.

ALL MARYLAND IS divided among three watersheds, though you might not know it given the attention to the Chesapeake Bay, whose drainage basin includes most of the state, and most of our environmental attention.A lesser-known one is the Gulf of Mexico, whose drainage extends to the westward-sloping sliver of Garrett County between Backbone Mountain and West Virginia.The gulf's problems may be greater than the Chesapeake's, with a "dead zone" of low-oxygen water that some years covers thousands of square miles.

Hurricanes might flood waterfront properties, but there's nothing like them for flushing pollutants out of the Chesapeake Bay and other estuaries. Researchers studying hurricanes' effects found that the storms' "scouring activity" cleaned two North Carolina waterways and wiped out the same microorganism that killed fish and sickened humans on Maryland's lower Eastern Shore in 1997. "It's very encouraging news," said JoAnn Burkholder, an ecologist at North Carolina State University and the study's lead author.