EASTON If you live in Easton and had a real tree this Christmas, it could become habitat for wildlife on Poplar Island.
For the past decade, town crews have taken discarded trees down to Tilghman Island, which then go on to Poplar Island. This year about half of the trees picked up about 300 wound up on the island, which is about a 20-minute boat ride from Tilghman.
The trees, strategically placed across the island, provide habitat and nesting sites for birds like common terns, least terns and American black ducks. Other trees are screwed into stumps and become nesting areas for egrets and herons.
Poplar Island is home to more than 200 bird species and 26 nesting species. Projects like using Christmas trees helps attract wildlife to the uninhabited island.
Once home to about 100 people in the 1880s, deforestation left the island without its root system and prone to erosion. By the 1920s, everyone who lived there left and Poplar Island became hunting ground in the 1930s and 1940s.
Then the island grew quiet, and eroded into the Bay. By the 1960s, the once more than 1,000-acre island had dwindled to barely 80 acres. In 1990, the area had decreased to less than 10 acres.
Construction on restoration started in 1998, and in 2001 the island got its first delivery of dredge material. Ten years later, the island is back to its 1847 size of 1,140 acres, but doesn't yet have the same volume.
Dredge delivery continues each year, and once done the project will have used 68 million cubic yards of silt and sediment dredged from the Chesapeake Bay. Those yards of dredge ultimately will develop 735 acres of wetlands, 840 acres of uplands and 140 acres of open water embayment.
Stardem.com
