On Assateague Island, a treasure hunter seeking pirate booty failed twice last week and stranded two boats, one of them a 26-foot Striker, in the marsh on the bayside of the island, the Maryland Coast Dispatch reports. Police said the owner of the boats told them he was after treasure buried by Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard …

In Cecil County, fish are shouting “Free at last, free at last.” That’s because last week, Maryland Natural Resources officials, assisted by American Rivers and several federal agencies, began removing an old stone dam on Octoraro Creek near where it flows into the Susquehanna River. There are over 77,000 dams in the nation, only three percent of which help produce electricity. Only 200 or so have been removed …

In Queen Anne’s County, citizens are responding swiftly and unmistakably about development. It took just a week for 1,000 of 12,000 registered voters in the county to respond to petition cards from the Eastern Shore Land Conservancy and the Chester River Association petitioning the county commission to halt development in rural areas until proper zoning occurs …

Our Creature Feature comes from the Gulf Coast, where conservationists are worried that Hurricane Katrina may have wiped out a portion of one of America’s most endangered species: the Mississippi sandhill crane.

Just 150 or so remain in the wild, plus 25 breeding pairs on a refuge in southeastern Mississippi near Interstate 10, an area badly damaged by Katrina, the National Wildlife Federation reports. This is the bird brought back from almost certain extinction a while back by a breeding program at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel.