When your favorite movie wins an Oscar, you can say I was there — virtually.     You’ve gotten closer than that in the world of puzzles if you’ve matched wits with Ben Tausig, winner of the Orca for Best Crossword of 2012.     Like the Oscars, the Orcas are awarded by insiders, the followers of Sam Donaldson’s blog, Diary of a Crossword Fiend.     Tausig’s March 28, 2012 puzzle, published in The Onion A.V. Club, won...

Oyster shells could be worth more than the change in your pocket if the Oyster Recovery Partnership can talk the political talk.     The nonprofit Partnership, which has planted four billion seed oysters in its work for recovery, is now seeking to persuade legislators to pass a bill giving a $1 tax credit for every bushel of oyster shells you recycle.     Shells are desperately needed to make habitats for new oyster families and the communities they support....

Betsy Kehne had been waiting for three decades for the bird perched a stone’s throw from her window.     At five years old, she’d grieved at learning that the pesticide DDT was pushing bald eagles to extinction.     DDT was banned in 1972. By the end of the century, the number of nesting eagles in Maryland had increased sixfold to 260 pairs. Today, more than 2,000 bald eagles make their homes in the Chesapeake region, so that seeing them soaring...

Ann Widdifield’s Passing Through Shady Side, published with AuthorHouse in 2013 Billy Poe’s African-Americans of Calvert County, published by Acadia House in 2008 James Johnston’s From Slave Ship to Harvard, published by Fordham University Press in 2012 by Sandra Olivetti Martin, Bay Weekly Editor, with Terri Boddorff and Cameron Caswell, Anne Arundel County Public Library; Beverly Izzy and Robbie McGaughran, Calvert County Public Library People from Africa and from...