Patuxent Research Refuge: wild land between Baltimore and Washington

Between Baltimore and Washington, a few turns off the Baltimore–Washington Parkway near Laurel, Maryland, is Patuxent Research Refuge: 12,841 acres of forest, lakes and meadow run by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Close to ten million people live within reach of it. About 250,000 visit in a year.

It has none of the fame of the Chesapeake's coastal refuges — Blackwater's salt marshes and migrating waterfowl, Chincoteague's cattails and the odd winter snowy owl. What it has is quieter and more unusual: a large piece of wild land in the middle of one of the fastest-growing parts of the country. Laurel sits where four counties meet — Anne Arundel, Montgomery, Prince George's and Howard — and all of them are building.

A research station first

In 1939 Henry Wallace, then Secretary of Agriculture, said the refuge's main job was to help restore wildlife. From the start it has been as much laboratory as refuge. Its scientists have long studied how to manage land for wildlife, especially how farmland can be turned back into habitat.

DDT. In the 1960s researchers at Patuxent looked at what pesticides were doing to birds. Bald eagles were declining while DDT was being sprayed everywhere, and the work here helped show the link: DDT made eggshells so thin the chicks never hatched. Rachel Carson drew heavily on that research for Silent Spring, and the research and the book together led the United States to ban DDT in 1972.

Whooping cranes. The refuge's best-known work now is with whooping cranes, North America's tallest birds. The species was listed as endangered in 1967.

About once a month the crane area opens to visitors, who can see a pair of a species that very nearly disappeared.

Visiting

The visitor center. Exhibits on bird migration across different parts of the country let you click, move and even flap your arms to see what helps or harms a flight — clear enough for children to connect grassland, pollution and the routes of birds like the wood thrush and the sanderling. There is a large hall of mounted animals, including a lifelike otter, and a panel of recorded birdsong children can play before going out to find the birds themselves.

The trails. Several loops of a little under to a little over a mile start by the center and wind past lakes where water lilies bloom and Canada geese feed.

• Conservation Heritage Loop — the only paved, wheelchair-accessible trail.
• Cash Lake Trail — 1.4 miles; wintering waterfowl in the cold months, and beavers, northern water snakes and insects on the lily pads the rest of the year.

The routes are marked on a map and easy to follow.

When to go. Early spring brings the warblers. In summer scarlet tanagers, the songbirds the entrance road is named for, flit in and out of the woods where they nest. Winter is underrated: the trails are short enough for a cold day, the frozen ponds make a sharp contrast with the brown woods, and eagles and herons are about. Every so often a rare bird turns up — a crossbill, a russet finch that seldom comes this far south — and the birders follow it.

Land this close to two cities rarely stays wild; conservation groups struggle to buy it and public money to protect it is scarce. That Patuxent is still here, open to wildlife and to anyone who needs an afternoon away from the traffic, is the most remarkable thing about it.

Sources

Written from "Exploring the Patuxent Research Refuge", published by the National Park Service's Chesapeake Bay office as an abridged article. Whooping crane counts are as that article gave them (2010); check the refuge's own page for current hours and crane-area open days.