Helen FieldsScience Writer

Today I went on an outing of the D.C. Science Writers Association to Patuxent River Park – a local park along the Patuxent River, a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay. We got a little archaeology tour and a boat trip. And a baby bird. Oh yes – a baby bird. That’s the part that’s supposed to keep you reading to the end.

My half of the group started with an archaeology tour of a place called Mount Calvert. “Mount” is, of course, a completely silly term in that part of the world. Yes, it is higher than the water. It’s even higher than some of the nearby land. But not by much.

It has a long and cool history. American Indians lived there thousands of years ago. In 1684, it became an English colonial town; in 1699, it was made the county seat of Prince George’s County, a position it held for just a few decades, but enough to litter the ground with colonial trash. Hardly anybody lived there; it was basically the place where you went because the court was in session. (The bars were also in session.) After the county seat was moved, Mount Calvert reverted to agriculture and was a tobacco plantation, worked by slave labor.

The plantation house from 1789 is still standing, with a little display inside on some of the items archaeologists have found there. It’s a lovely brick Federalist house. Being on a little rise does give them a bit of a view down the Patuxent toward the Bay.

Archaeologists were at work outside. The whole area is divided into a grid (with giant nails marking the corners). As they dig down, they dump shovelfuls of soil into a sieve to see what’s in them – the occasional bit of pipestem or a nail, but mostly rocks. In this pit, they’ve gotten through the loose soil and are now poking around trying to find the postholes from some old buildings.

Someone asked what they do when they’re done with one of the holes. They fill it in, but first, they often go to the bank, get a roll of 2010 pennies, and scatter them around so future generations of archaeologists will know they’ve been there. How cute is that?

Here’s some of the stuff they’ve dug up – presumably thrown away by residents, not buried by jokester archaeologists:

That’s a couple of pipestem fragments, a hand-forged nail, and a chunk of prehistoric pottery.

For the next stage of the trip, we left archaeology and turned to nature, with a boat tour of a little creek that feeds into the Patuxent. It’s a lovely place – all that water and all that sky, with a strip of green in between.

We saw a beaver lodge, lots of herons, and quite a crop of ospreys.

The guy who lead the boat tour, naturalist Greg Kearns, has been working at this park for decades. His job is park stuff – renting out kayaks and driving the boat and whatnot – but he’s also spent a lot of time making the area welcoming to ospreys. Ospreys are eagles that fish. They’re big. They have a wing span on the order of five feet. They’re supposed to nest in trees, but these days, they mostly nest on handy little nest platforms that humans build for them. So this creek is full of this guy’s platforms. At this time of year, the moms are sitting on the eggs. Both parents take care of the babies. This nest had two adults sitting on it:

Can you see their two heads sticking up? Actually, you can see a lot of the body of the one on the right; the other head is just to the left of that. (The thing poking up on the left is part of the nest.) Kearns is involved in bigger osprey-saving programs, too; he’s sent osprey chicks off to other states to help get populations back. Ospreys, like all birds of prey, were in a lot of trouble for a while there because of DDT. But now they’re back. I saw one fishing in the Tidal Basin when I went to look at the cherry blossoms.

So we’re going along, seeing all these ospreys sitting on their nests. With binoculars, I could see their big yellow eyes up close. But then we came up to this one nest, and he said, oh, that one’s got eggs – he checks them all regularly. Since it was high tide, he could take the pontoon boat right up to the nest. He stopped the boat, climbed up on a bench, reached his arm in, and pulled out…this:

It’s a baby osprey! Hatching!! Saying “peep”! It’s been living off the yolk its whole life. It just has to do that for a little longer – tomorrow it should finish hatching and be ready for fish. You can see its little white egg tooth, the spot on the beak that birds use to break out of its shell. The mother flew around being annoyed while we were checking out her baby, but Kearns said they aren’t particularly bothered about people. Indeed, she landed on the nest again right after we left.

UPDATE: I added the naturalist’s name.

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