On the Bay

Once considered little more than nuisances to progress, marshes across the United States have been filled in and paved over to make room for important projects, such as JFK International Airport in Queens or, say, the city of Miami.

You may have heard people say oysters were once able to filter the whole Chesapeake Bay in three days. Though that is merely a figure of speech, oysters have long been known to filter bodies of water. But there is another type of bivalve mollusk that is known to provide the same service, and is gaining in popularity in fresher water. The mussel is that particular mollusk.

Maryland’s oyster aquaculture harvest so far this year has already exceeded last year’s, despite a deluge of fresh water from storms that scientists and managers worried would stymie growth.

So far, the Maryland harvest for 2018 is just over 80,000 bushels of farm-raised oysters; in 2017, it was 75,000. In 2016, it was 65,000 bushels, and that was a 1,000 percent increase since 2012.

I’m on the edge of a bench with my life vest zipped and buckled. I have a small red point-and-shoot camera and a pair of petite binoculars that I think looks pretty stylish — for the birding set. Twenty-four of my fellow voyagers carry cameras with ginormous lenses, binoculars twice the size of mine, and spotting scopes on tripods.

Phillips Creek Marsh lies on the final seaside stretch of the Delmarva Peninsula in Virginia. It is a swath of wetland grasses with patches of reeds and warped remnants of a boardwalk. Pines fringe the uplands, and a flock of seabirds socialize on a distant mudflat to the southeast. The sky on a Thursday in mid-May was an overcast milky blue.