Our Work

Left photo shows a branch with four small paw paw flowers. Photo on the right shows one paw paw flower straight on showing the stigma and petals.

What’s Poppin’? Phenological Fun: Paw Paw

Like a lot of fruiting trees, a paw paw cannot produce fruit on its own, and April-May is the best time to see paw paw flowers!

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A belted kingfisher hovering as it waits to catch some prey (Photo Credit: Ron Dudley).

Diving into the World of the Belted Kingfisher

Due to the abundance of fish and insects that a waterway provides, you can find a wide variety of birds while kayaking streams in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, including the belted kingfisher, Megaceryle alcyon.

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A pair of mounted passenger pigeons are frozen in time at the Royal Ontario Museum (Photo credit: rom.on.ca).

An Empty Sky: The Plight of the Passenger Pigeon

How does a species that was once so important disappear completely from the hearts and minds of those whose ancestors witnessed this spectacle? And maybe most importantly, how do we prevent something like this from happening again?

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The right side of a wood thrush perched upright on a rock.

The Forest Flautist: the Wood Thrush

Have you ever heard the flutey call of the wood thrush? These interior forest specialists are commonly found in our eastern forests, but they are vulnerable to habitat changes, like fragmentation, invasive plant infiltration, and herbivory in the forest understory.

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A garden in front of house

How you can help change the perception of a “messy” yard

A recent news story involved a homeowner along the Elizabeth River whose next door neighbor hadn’t cut or trimmed the vegetation in his yard in over four years. This colorful local dispute gets to the heart of a perception issue that is critical to the future of the Chesapeake Bay and its wildlife.

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D.C. environmentalist shares her biggest takeaways from chairing the Stakeholders’ Advisory Committee

We sat down with Julie Lawson, chair of the Chesapeake Bay Program’s Stakeholders’ Advisory Committee to ask about her experience serving on the Committee as well as some of her thoughts on the Chesapeake Bay Program at large.

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A group of volunteers pose behind several bags of trash on a trail at Crooked Branch Ravine Park.

Project Clean Stream Kick Off Events Remove 1,940 Pounds of Trash from the Watershed!

The Alliance kicked off yet another year of Project Clean Stream. So far, we’ve held 23 events and collected over 6,500 pounds of trash from the Chesapeake Bay watershed!

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Knowledge is Power; Know Your Flowers (Part 2) – Flower Parts

Remember our Inflorescence Story from this past March? Take another deep dive into flowers with us in Part 2 and learn more about flower anatomy.

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What’s poppin’? Phenological Fun: Lesser celandine

Have you found this invasive perenial wildflower yet? It’s currently poppin’, so be on the look out!

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A person crouched next to a creek placing a pole into the water

Putting Chesapeake Monitoring Cooperative Data to Use

What good is data if it never gets used? The Chesapeake Monitoring Cooperative (CMC) is here to make sure that doesn’t happen! Each group within the CMC network is monitoring to achieve their own unique and individual goals for education, advocacy, outreach, and communication and have made enormous impacts on their communities.

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