On the Bay

My journey through college has been an untraditional one. After graduating from North Caroline High School in 2011, I enrolled at Chesapeake College in neighboring Talbot County. I had no idea what I wanted to study, and as a first-generation college student, I was a bit lost in how the whole college thing worked. Read more...

Most kids spend their time at the beach swimming and playing in the ocean. Not Brittany Wolfe. Growing up surrounded by water on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, she was more interested in poking around the intertidal zone, finding shells and wondering about the animals that lived in them.

Some 20 miles upstream from Baltimore on the Patapsco River, a four-inch-long American eel is making a monumental climb. Wriggling up a steep 30-foot-long metal gutter lined with a climbing substrate, the eel finally gains the summit, then slides down the other side into a mesh bag in a holding tank. 

Ordinarily at this time of year, Kit Waskom Pollard is cooking oysters. Grilled in the backyard, sprinkled with rosemary and sea salt, their aroma signals one celebration after another: Easter, Mother’s Day, her father’s birthday, maybe an engagement or a graduation.

Thousands of American eels captured at the Conowingo Dam eel ramp are swimming en masse in a huge holding tank, waiting to be trucked upstream where they will be released to restock part of the Susquehanna River and its tributaries. Read more...