In Their Own Words: Stories of the Chesapeake Region
There are so many stories to be told about the Chesapeake Bay and the coastal waters of Maryland and Virginia. And the best storytellers are the men and women who work these waters or study its ecology, who live near or visit these shores for the fish and fun and beauty they offer.
Our video journal, which begins below, carries their stories in interviews and short narratives told where possible in their own words, words that offer brief glimpses into the life of the tidewater region. All the videos, except where noted, were produced by award-winning filmmaker Michael W. Fincham.
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The Ocean City, Maryland, Beach Patrol began in
1930 with one lifeguard watching over several blocks of swimming beach. The
beach patrol now numbers nearly 200 lifeguards watching over 10.5 miles of
public beach.
Link to this: http://www.mdsg.umd.edu/videos/index.php?area_id=3049&showpagen=1#pod_33
The Corsica River on Maryland's Eastern Shore is a little waterway with big problems. But it is also the site of one of the most intensive restoration efforts ever mounted in the Chesapeake watershed. Take a tour with some of the Corsica's champions to learn about efforts on the ground.
Link to this: http://www.mdsg.umd.edu/videos/index.php?area_id=3049&showpagen=1#pod_36
Who invents new oysters? Stan Allen does. He not only breeds disease-resistant oysters by speeding up the familiar process of natural selection, but he's also created a new kind of oyster, an oyster nature never designed. His invention is called a triploid oyster. It carries extra chromosomes and in the right conditions, it can grow nearly twice as fast as natural oysters. Widely grown on oyster farms along the west coast and in other countries, the triploid oyster is now coming to the Chesapeake.
Link to this: http://www.mdsg.umd.edu/videos/index.php?area_id=3049&showpagen=1#pod_34
Oyster gardening, growing baby oysters off a dock, keeps growing in popularity among Bay-area residents interested in restoring water quality in Chesapeake Bay. Most of those dockside oysters will end up on sanctuary reefs where they will go to work filtering water at the rate of 50 gallons a day. Maryland residents can now get oysters and gear and training from a number of environmental organizations around the state. Here's how one organization trains and equips new gardeners.
Link to this: http://www.mdsg.umd.edu/videos/index.php?area_id=3049&showpagen=1#pod_35
Julius Lowry remembers earlier days on a cleaner river: swimming and
cat fishing and hanging out along the river banks in Washington, DC.
From "Endangered Species," a documentary by the Earth Conservation
Corps, a nonprofit environmental organization that puts the city's
young people to work cleaning up the river.
Link to this: http://www.mdsg.umd.edu/videos/index.php?area_id=3049&showpagen=1#pod_10
"Fear the Turtle" began as a T-shirt
slogan, coined by a fan, to celebrate the University of Maryland's sports
teams, but it grew into a well-funded marketing campaign to publicize the
University's high rankings for academics and research. Marching terrapins were
unleashed in a 2005 television spot. Produced by Mac Nelson and University
Video.
Link to this: http://www.mdsg.umd.edu/videos/index.php?area_id=3049&showpagen=1#pod_32
When the University of Maryland wanted to highlight
its continuing rise to prominence as an academic and research institution, it
turned again to its terrapin mascot and sent "Testudo" rocketing into
space in this 2004 television spot. Produced by Mac Nelson and University
Video.
Link to this: http://www.mdsg.umd.edu/videos/index.php?area_id=3049&showpagen=1#pod_31
Diamondback terrapins, a once-plentiful species now
dwindling in the Chesapeake Bay, became the unofficial mascot for the
University of Maryland teams as early as 1924. The iconic "Testudo,"
namef for a bronze sculpture of the terrapin on campus, would not become the
official mascot for the school until 1933. For decades Testudo was often a
comic or a combative cartoon character. In 2003, University Marketing and
Communications began its well-publicized "Fear the Turtle" campaign
that created a handsome, charismatic, roaring terrapin.
Produced by Mac Nelson and University Video.
Link to this: http://www.mdsg.umd.edu/videos/index.php?area_id=3049&showpagen=1#pod_30
After World War II, President Curley Byrd opened
the University of Maryland to all returning veterans with a high school degree
and used funds from the G.I. bill to fund the building of Byrd Stadium and Cole
Fieldhouse. He also hired a coach who would take his Maryland Terrapins to the
top of college football.
Link to this: http://www.mdsg.umd.edu/videos/index.php?area_id=3049&showpagen=1#pod_29
By 1920 the aggie college had become the home
campus of a new University of Maryland. By 1924, the football coach began
calling his football teams "The Maryland Terrapins," and by 1935, the
coach was president of the university. During his 19-year tenure, H.C. Curley
Byrd raised funds for expanding the campus and redesigned it with
Georgian-style architecture that reflected the colonial era in American
history.
Link to this: http://www.mdsg.umd.edu/videos/index.php?area_id=3049&showpagen=2#pod_28
The University of Maryland grew out of small
agricultural college in College Park where cadets, many of them engineering
students, began forming baseball and football teams in the 1890s, largely
against the wishes of the faculty who saw sports as a distraction from study.
The teams were often called "The Aggies" or "The Farmers,"
and they lost more than they won until 1905 when a student named H.C.
"Curley" Byrd began to star as a pitcher for the baseball team, a
quarterback for the football team and a sprinter for the track squad. In 1912,
he returned as a football coach with big plans for his little alma mater.
Link to this: http://www.mdsg.umd.edu/videos/index.php?area_id=3049&showpagen=2#pod_27
Terrapin populations seem to be booming out on a
new, largely rebuilt island on the eastern side of Chesapeake Bay. When
biologist Willem Roosenburg began monitoring terrapin nests on Poplar Island,
he found hatchling survival rates as high as 70 to 80 percent. The Army Corps
of Engineers has been diking and filling this site to create a large manmade
island out of several small, separate islets that were dwindling away, the
victims of erosion and subsidence.
Link to this: http://www.mdsg.umd.edu/videos/index.php?area_id=3049&showpagen=2#pod_26
This slender channel between Kent Island and the Eastern Shore was once
a seafood center where 14 busy seafood houses bought oysters and crabs
from hundreds of watermen. Only one seafood house and one shipping
house are still open, but a new Maryland Watermen's Monument has now
gone up here to honor all the men and women who once worked these
waters -- and the few dozen who still do.
Link to this: http://www.mdsg.umd.edu/videos/index.php?area_id=3049&showpagen=2#pod_25
Every Labor Day is race day on Deal Island. Watermen in skipjacks and
workboats compete for trophies and glory. David Horseman of Chance gets
to fire the starter's horn for the Workboat Docking Contest.
Link to this: http://www.mdsg.umd.edu/videos/index.php?area_id=3049&showpagen=2#pod_11
Do the watermen of the Chesapeake Bay share similar values? A common
culture? A collective worldview? Is their outlook rooted in their work,
their sense of community, their sense of place? Anthropologist Michael
Paolisso took those questions to Deal Island, an isolated enclave along
Maryland's Eastern Shore. Here he talks about his work, and watermen
Robert Daniels, Dickie Webster and Art Daniels talk about their lives.
Link to this: http://www.mdsg.umd.edu/videos/index.php?area_id=3049&showpagen=2#pod_12
At the Horn Point Environmental Lab, Don Meritt turns out seed oysters
full of oyster spat, and Charlie Frentz of the Oyster Recovery
Partnership plants them in Chesapeake Bay.
Link to this: http://www.mdsg.umd.edu/videos/index.php?area_id=3049&showpagen=3#pod_16
Scientists come up with conflicting evidence about the life cycle and fish-killing powers of the dinoflagellate called
Pfiesteria piscicida. Features JoAnn Burkholder, Wayne Litaker, Wolfgang Vogelbein and Andrew Gordon.
Link to this: http://www.mdsg.umd.edu/videos/index.php?area_id=3049&showpagen=3#pod_24
When watermen find wounded fish along a lonely river in Maryland, they kick off a scientific debate and an environmental crisis focused on a mysterious microbe that may -- or may not -- cause sick fish and sick people. Watch the title sequence from this award-winning film.
Link to this: http://www.mdsg.umd.edu/videos/index.php?area_id=3049&showpagen=3#pod_23
A skipjack goes down to the bay again - the first success in an ambitious project at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum to restore the last working sail fleet in the country.
Link to this: http://www.mdsg.umd.edu/videos/index.php?area_id=3049&showpagen=3#pod_2
Seafood growers and packers are calling for replanting the Chesapeake
with oysters from China. But scientists have formed cautious and
sometimes conflicting opinions about the promise and perils of planting
non-natives. Can
Crassotrea ariakensis
revive the tidewater seafood economy? Can it create ecological benefits
for the ecosystem? Here in their own words are an oyster packer, an
oyster grower and two oyster scientists.
Link to this: http://www.mdsg.umd.edu/videos/index.php?area_id=3049&showpagen=3#pod_15
Since the 1890s watermen have been dredging oysters under sail on
skipjacks - "two-sail bateaux" that were first built in dozens of small
boatyards along the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Virginia.
Link to this: http://www.mdsg.umd.edu/videos/index.php?area_id=3049&showpagen=3#pod_8
When Adam Frederick taught high school biology he got his students into
science by getting them out of the classroom - out into the woods and
fields and streams where they could see biology at work. Environmental
science leads to better scores in science, according to Frederick, now
a Marine Science Educator with Maryland Sea Grant Extension. And it's a
teaching tool that can be used across all disciplines.
Link to this: http://www.mdsg.umd.edu/videos/index.php?area_id=3049&showpagen=4#pod_18
Oceanographer Bill Boicourt uses the Scanfish, an underwater flying
wing, to document a new discovery in Chesapeake Bay: a Hydraulic
Control Zone just north of the Rappahannock Shoals. Like a valve on a
water faucet, the Hydraulic Control can regulate the flow of salty
ocean water into the northern Bay. As the Scanfish glides up and down
through the Bay, it can take tens of thousands of readings per hour,
measuring salinity, chlorophyll, dissolved oxygen and plankton.
Link to this: http://www.mdsg.umd.edu/videos/index.php?area_id=3049&showpagen=4#pod_14
A pioneer in estuarine paleoecology, Grace Brush has been charting the
history of environmental change in the Chesapeake watershed. Her
technique: dig up cores from the bottom of the Bay's rivers, marshes
and mainstem. Her hypothesis: the sediment holds a history of ancient
and recent events that altered the estuary. On May 6, 2004, Grace Brush
became the first woman to be awarded the Mathias Medal for research
that has a significant impact on public policy.
Link to this: http://www.mdsg.umd.edu/videos/index.php?area_id=3049&showpagen=4#pod_13
When a Maryland Bay pilot brings a big ship up the Chesapeake Bay to
Baltimore, he (or she) is making the longest single-pilot passage in
America. When Captain Randy Bourgeois boards his ship, he is 8 miles
from shore, 150 miles from Baltimore.
His job: guide a deep draft ship through a long, shallow estuary. And
do it without incident, accident or environmental catastrophe.
Link to this: http://www.mdsg.umd.edu/videos/index.php?area_id=3049&showpagen=4#pod_22
Can students raise striped bass in their high school and middle school
classrooms? Only if they can tackle and solve a slew of research
questions and technical problems, ranging from water quality to food
supply to fish disease. At South Carroll High School, science teacher
Bob Foor-Hogue set up aquaculture projects for his students and the
result was a pioneering, problem-solving approach to science education.
Working with Foor-Hogue Sea Grant educators Adam Frederick and Jackie
Takacs are now exporting his approach and their fish to other schools
around the state.
Link to this: http://www.mdsg.umd.edu/videos/index.php?area_id=3049&showpagen=4#pod_20
Teachers have to learn before they can teach, and if they are going to
teach aquaculture they have a lot to learn. Bob Foor-Hogue of South
Carroll High School and Adam Frederick of Maryland Sea Grant Extension
have been organizing summer workshops for teachers since 1998. They
claim an aquaculture project is one of the best ways to get American
students to plug into serious science. Here's what some of the teachers
who plugged into the workshop have to say about the experience.
Link to this: http://www.mdsg.umd.edu/videos/index.php?area_id=3049&showpagen=4#pod_19
Maryland Sea Grant documentaries bring marine science, policy, and other issues of concern to hundreds of thousands of people in the Chesapeake region. These award-winning films are made available on public television, cable and commercial stations, and for educational use by environmental organizations, citizen associations, and classroom teachers. They are also available for purchase through our online store.
To read more about our documentaries, click on the links below.
What caused the collapse of oyster populations in the Chesapeake Bay? Was this ecological calamity a tragedy of overfishing? A casualty of pollution? An accident of history? A scientific mistake? Our documentary Who Killed Crassostrea virginica: The Fall & Rise of Chesapeake Bay Oysters, re-evaluates these theories in light of recent findings. It also reveals how scientific detective work solved a 40-year mystery.
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