By: Mary K. Zajac


On the wild side: Jim Peters surveys the urban wetland next to Fort McHenry that he has spent a decade helping to restore. | photo by Valerie Paulsgrove


“You are standing over the Fort McHenry tunnel,” Jim Peters says. It seems an improbable place in the city, this wooden pier at the southern tip of a small marsh adjacent to Fort McHenry, past the small outbuildings used for science demonstrations for school children, past the hanging gourds used as purple martin houses, past the small pond where a great egret steps delicately through the mud and the rocks where thick brown water snakes lie braided together in the morning sun. Across the hazy Middle Branch of the Patapsco, ships are unloading automobiles at the Port of Baltimore. But here the air is quiet, pierced only by an occasional bird’s cry.

For more than a decade, this 10-acre wetland has been Jim Peters’ domain. Peters, 79, has the trim, ruddy handsomeness of an old film star; with his calm blue-gray eyes and shock of white hair, he could play the sage country doctor in a 1950s Western. He’s listed on Fort McHenry’s website as the fort’s ornithologist, but that does little to describe his many roles—teacher, scientist, gardener, tour guide, even trash collector. There have been years when he estimates he’s spent 1,400 hours on the marsh. To see the wetlands through his eyes is to discover what the tundra swans and other birds that migrate through Baltimore find: a natural oasis on the fringe of the city.

Sandwiched between the fort and a warehouse and dock, the marsh is known variously as the Fort McHenry Field Station or the Fort McHenry Wetland. Over the years, the property has had a number of uses, including a swimming beach and, in the 1940s, a dock for the houseboat of a woman known as Tugboat Annie. The land was restored by the Maryland Transportation Authority in the late 1970s as penance for the marshlands destroyed during the construction of the Fort McHenry Tunnel. Trouble was, the mitigation plan made no allowances for upkeep. In the 1990s, the site fell into disrepair until 1998, when the National Aquarium in Baltimore began a program of on-site monitoring and maintenance, run almost single-handedly by Peters.

In his time here, Peters has identified 253 bird species, including the first bald eagle documented nesting inside Baltimore City limits; he spotted it across the Middle Branch from the marsh, at Masonville Cove. (For a schedule of Peters’ free Fort McHenry bird walks, go to www.nps.gov/fomc.) He has listed thirty-five species of mammals, including muskrat, deer (who swim across the Middle Branch to the fort property), and his nemesis, the beaver that loves to chew down the trees he has planted around the marsh. On the morning we meet, Peters is still buzzing from a sighting the night before of a red-necked phalarope, a wading bird that’s extremely rare for this area.

“Jim has brought to light the value of a small, high-quality habitat within this really developed area,” says David Nemerson, a conservation biologist at the National Aquarium who studies the wetland. “This is only 8 to 10 acres stuck in the very urbanized Baltimore harbor, but animals find it. We use the data he has collected all the time to say it’s important to maintain preservation patches.”

Raised on a farm in Connecticut during the Great Depression, Peters remembers how he “crept up on birds and learned their calls” because his parents couldn’t afford a set of binoculars. He thought about becoming an ornithologist but instead made a career teaching science for the Baltimore County public schools and, later, serving as a supervisor of their science programs. He’s received grants from the National Science Foundation, studied botany at the University of Maryland’s College Park campus, and hiked alongside naturalist Elmer Worthley (husband of Miss Jean, of PBS’ beloved Hodgepodge Lodge), who used only the Latin names for flora and fauna and quizzed Peters at the end of each walk about what he saw.

As we walk through the wetlands, Peters points out cedar waxwings feasting on mulberries, a brick-red-and-black orchard oriole (Peters has also seen Baltimore orioles on the site), and a tree swallow (“See the iridescent blue with the white belly?”) nesting in one of the many bird boxes Peters has made in his home workshop and brought to the marsh. Now and then we pass small, hand-lettered signs where Peters has named various geographical features: “Walden Pond,” “The Butterfly Garden,” and “Cross Creek,” after Marjorie Kinnan Rawling’s book.

For all his fascination with the wild things, Peters seems comfortable with the give and take between humans and nature here. At the entrance to the marsh trail, there’s a sign he’s made that lists new species added in 2008, including a ruddy quail-dove that Peters speculates must have hitched a ride here from the Bahamas aboard a Domino Sugar ship. As we pass a former fox den, Peters remembers that when he built this trail, some visitors complained that he’d disturbed the fox’s habitat. But before the trail was built, the fox had to weave through the weeds to get to her den; now she uses the trail. “She has I-95 outside her door,” Peters says dryly. “I’ve had a lot of experience with animals, and they’re very adaptable.”

That may be true, but amid this marsh’s rebirth, there has also been loss. When fort administrators mowed a section of grass that had previously been left long to replicate a historic cow pasture, the bobolinks, red-winged blackbirds, and savannah sparrows disappeared. A few years ago, the Steinweg Corp. demolished a chimney next door to the fort, so Peters lost the chimney swifts that resided there. After the company built a new warehouse in a nearby field, the great blue herons that feasted on grasshoppers each summer moved on.

Still, this site has seeded other revivals. Baltimore City students have helped grow marsh grasses here, then transplanted them to Blackwater and Eastern Neck national wildlife refuges. And Peters’ bird walks have inspired scores of upstart naturalists, including ranger Vince Vaise, the fort’s chief of interpretation. “He literally changed my life, woke me up to birding and trees and nature,” Vaise says. Visitors know the fort for its human history rather than its natural history, he says, but Peters’ work shows it is rich in both.

In 2003, Peters was the first recipient of the National Park Service’s George B. Hartzog Award for Outstanding Volunteer Service by an individual. Next year he’ll turn 80, and he talks about cutting back his duties on the marsh. He’d like to travel, spend more time with his grandchildren, devote less time to mowing trails and giving tours. Nemerson says that Peters has been threatening to do this for years.

New volunteers may appear to continue monitoring the wetlands and keep trash at bay, but it’s hard to predict what will happen without Peters’ diligence. The fox could lose her freeway to high grass, the beaver could re-establish its deforestation agenda, and the young buck who’s been nibbling the dogwoods recently might take up permanent residence. The marsh would once again be untidy and untamed, but still a living example of nature’s ebb and flow.

—Mary K. Zajac









EMAIL TO EDITOR // SEND TO A FRIEND // PRINT