The Chesapeake Bay watershed has a new national wildlife refuge, its first in more than 25 years. The refuge aims to protect a vast area of critical habitat for birds and rare fish, insects and plants in rapidly developing Southern Maryland.
Capping nearly 15 years of discussion and planning, U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced the establishment of the Southern Maryland Woodlands National Wildlife Refuge in December 2024.
Its goal: conserving up to 40,000 acres of land over the next 30 years, not in one huge swath but as a collection of parcels across five counties: Anne Arundel, Calvert, Charles, Prince George’s and St. Mary’s.
Haaland called the new refuge’s creation “an incredible milestone in locally led conservation efforts,” the product of collaboration among federal, state and local governments and multiple nonprofit conservation groups, including the Chesapeake Conservancy, American Chestnut Land Trust and the Nature Conservancy.
Greg Bowen, head of the Southern Maryland Conservation Alliance, the umbrella group for the collaboration, called the refuge’s formation “a huge win for land conservation in the region.” He predicted it would boost the region’s economy through increased tourism and outdoor recreation while also preserving farmland and forests from loss to development.
More than half of Maryland’s forests and wetlands that existed prior to European settlement have been lost with about 1 million acres of that developed just in the last 50 years. The greater Washington-Baltimore region’s population continues to grow. It is expected to top 20 million in less than 30 years, noted Joel Dunn, who until the end of 2024 was president and CEO of the Chesapeake Conservancy.
“This is one of the most pristine landscapes on the Chesapeake Bay watershed’s western shore,” Dunn said, “and it faces many threats. Our forests continue to be converted at a rate of about 54 acres a day, and more than 6 million acres of the forest and wetland resources in our watershed remain vulnerable to development.”
The new refuge, Dunn added, “offers an opportunity to halt and even reverse biodiversity loss in this important place and in a way that fully integrates and respects the leadership and rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities.”
In the works since 2010, planning for the new refuge kicked into high gear in 2023, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service formally proposed it and sought public feedback. Federal officials initially declared that they wanted to conserve up to 30,000 acres over the next 30 years. But, soon after, they increased that goal by another 10,000 acres.
Over the years, wildlife service biologists have identified more than 169,000 acres of ecologically valuable land in the five-county area that are currently unprotected from development. The best of those parcels totaled a little more than 40,000 acres, explained Dan Murphy, chief of habitat restoration and conservation in the wildlife service’s Chesapeake Bay field office.
The refuge would focus on acquiring land from willing donors or sellers from the Bowie area south to Solomons along the lower Patuxent River and also in the watersheds of four Potomac River tributaries: Nanjemoy and Mattawoman creeks, Zekiah Swamp and McIntosh Run.
Rather than one contiguous refuge, wildlife service officials plan a “landscape scale” refuge similar to the Rappahannock River Valley National Wildlife Refuge in Virginia. Established in 1996, that refuge encompasses about 10,000 acres in a series of mostly unconnected tracts across five counties.
Management of the new refuge would fall for now to the staff of the 13,000-acre Patuxent Research Refuge midway between Baltimore and the District of Columbia.
The areas targeted for conservation in Southern Maryland harbor shrinking habitat for waterfowl, shorebirds, forest-interior and grassland-dependent birds as well as threatened and endangered species such as the dwarf wedgemussels, Atlantic and shortnose sturgeons, puritan and northeastern tiger beetles and northern long-eared bats.
The refuge’s first acquisition is a 31-acre tract on the Nanjemoy Peninsula, which was donated by the Nature Conservancy.
“The Nature Conservancy first began protecting land along Nanjemoy Creek almost 50 years ago in 1978, when we recognized how important and special this landscape was for local wildlife and regional biodiversity,” said Kahlil Kettering, executive director of the conservancy’s Maryland and DC chapter.
One of the most forested and undeveloped areas in Maryland’s upper coastal plain, the peninsula also harbors Native American sites and other places of cultural and historical significance. The conservancy began acquiring land there in the 1970s to protect what was then the largest great blue heron rookery on the East Coast north of Florida. The birds abandoned the rookery about 15 years ago, but the conservancy continued to work there to save habitat for the federally endangered dwarf wedgemussels, said spokesman Matt Kane.
The conservancy plans to donate additional parcels to the refuge totaling more than 300 acres, but Kane said it will retain much of its Nanjemoy preserve for the time being, in part to continue building a collaborative relationship with the Piscataway Native American communities.