Features (All)

Article - News; by Dennis Doyle - 3/17/11

Is Commercial Netting Sustainable?

Sports and conservation groups challenge harvest traditions

Illegal commercial gill netting (and consequently, some arrests) continues despite all the attention net-fishing has been drawing on the water and in the news. Now the Coastal Conservation Association (ccamd.com) has asked Maryland Department of Natural Resources Secretary John Griffin to re-evaluate both commercial gill net operations and pound net fisheries. Gill netting, currently and historically, is an easily and often abused activity, the nationwide marine resources...

Article - Green Living; by Diana Beechener - 3/17/11

Is Bigger Better?

Anne Arundel County hopes larger containers amount to a greater recycling haul

The bigger, the better. That seems to be the theory behind Anne Arundel County’s push to distribute 65-gallon recycling containers throughout the county. “Recycling is a budgetary priority of this administration,” says County Executive John R. Leopold. “I’m always looking for ways to enhance the convenience of our recycling plan.” Our recycling habits now fall 10 percent short of the county goal of 50 percent recycling...

Article - Green Living; by Matt Driscoll - 3/17/11

Joining Hands to Fill The Breach

An army of volunteers give a rare Chesapeake marsh a second life

A boardwalk leads through pinewoods to the water. From its beginning, you see a sliver of shining Bay. As you walk along the worn planks raised over marshland, the Dominion Cove Point Liquefied Natural Gas facility — the industrial campus, the seven vast blinding-white storage tanks — disappear. At the end, the marsh and the tall reeds give way to the low dunes of Cove Point Beach. From the beach, you can see across the Bay to Taylors Island. But the view is not...

Article - Things; by Diana Beechener - 3/10/11

What's With That? Lessons of a Tumbled Tree

Timber!

On a recent blustery day, a thunderous crack and immediate darkness in the kitchen alerted me to a wayward limb obstructing the power lines. Dangling from our power lines and blocking our road was the top half of a neighbor’s pine tree. We should call someone, the gathering of alarmed neighbors agreed. Who do you call when a tree takes a swan dive onto a public road? As we debated the finer points of tree...

Article - Creature Feature; by Margaret Tearman - 3/10/11

This Week’s Creature Feature: King Lear Courts Queen...

Will this relationship go to the dogs?

You’ve probably heard of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, the assumption that anyone can be linked to the actor through six steps … like my sister worked for a man whose wife is the third cousin of Bacon’s hairdresser. We can go one better with Six Degrees of GCH Foxcliffe Hickory Wind. Who? Hickory is Grand Dame of American dogs, the Scottish deerhound crowned Westminster Kennel Club’s Best in Show last month, the...

Article - People; by Aries Matheos - 3/10/11

Gone to the Dogs

For her 10th birthday, Maggie Strandquist asked her guests to help her help animals in need

For the big One-Oh, Maggie Strandquist of Arnold said no to presents for herself and yes to presents for the animals at the SPCA of Anne Arundel County. “I didn’t think I needed anything, so I thought who else needed things,” Maggie reports. “I love animals and really wanted to help them, so I thought of the SPCA.” Maggie was quick to think of the SPCA because she and a friend had already organized a Girl Scout walkathon at...

Article - News; by Sandra Olivetti Martin - 3/10/11

The Magician

Anne Arundel County Public Library’s
new administrator, Skip Auld,
is learning to pull dollars
out of thin air

Skip Auld will have to be a magician to pull all he wants out of Anne Arundel County Public Library’s incredible shrinking budget. Anne Arundel was a big step up for Auld, who came here in early November from running the Durham County public library system, about half the size of Anne Arundel County, in North Carolina. Auld’s big promotion came with a bigger problem. Total library funding has fallen 16 percent since 2007,...

Article - News; by Dennis Doyle - 3/3/11

A Grass Roots Petition to Ban Gill Nets

With Chesapeake Bay the striped bass nursery of the Atlantic, our actions have an impact far beyond Maryland shores

Jerome Collier of Severna Park has initiated an online petition (http://www.petitiononline.com/yrrejmaj) to halt the use of gill nets. Collier says his goal is not to stop commercial fishing but to urge Maryland Department of Natural Resources to shift this rockfish allocation to a more manageable method of harvesting. Gill nets have been prone to abuse, and hence outlawed, almost everywhere they have been used commercially. One remarkable thing about this petition, other...

Article - People; by Sandra Lee Anderson - 3/3/11

Citizens of the World

Six Chesapeake volunteers tell how the 50-year-old Peace Corps changed their lives

Walking through Gaziantep, Turkey, meant keeping an eye on any young man walking toward me. At the instant he was about to bump me, I did a quick sidestep. In that conservative eastern country 45 years ago, this was nothing to worry about: just a young man’s trick. My sidestep was one small adjustment Peace Corps volunteers make to live by the rules of a foreign culture. I’m one of 200,000 Americans who has volunteered in 139 countries since the Peace Corps...

Article - Creature Feature; by Diana Beechener - 2/24/11

This Week’s Creature Feature: Wild Birthday...

DC Cupcakes gives you a sweet reason to Go Bananas

Eleven-year-old Kwame and 9-year-old Kojo celebrated their birthdays with cupcakes. As part of Georgetown Cupcakes’ reality show on TLC, DC Cupcakes, the sister-owned business, delivered a giant gorilla sculpture, comprised of cupcakes, to the National Zoo where the two male western lowland gorillas were celebrating their big days. Sadly, gorillas can’t get the real sweet treat, so zookeepers gave them an approximation of Georgetown Cupcakes’ red velvet...