Photograph by Janet Norman, USFWS

Where’s the biggest grassland habitat in Annapolis?

Few people besides hard-core bird watchers know that this environmental treasure is located underneath the familiar radio towers seen in the Annapolis skyline, at the Navy’s Greenbury Point Conservation Area. Greenbury Point has a variety of other habitats including wooded coves, shallow wetland ponds, forests and scrub/shrub areas. Many interesting wildlife make this area their home. For example, Greenbury Point supports the only bobwhite quail population in Anne Arundel County, Maryland.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service staff are busy developing a Natural Resources Management Plan for the Annapolis Area Complex of the Navy, which includes the Naval Academy, the North Severn Complex of the golf course and Greenbury Point and the Naval Dairy Farm in Gambrills, Maryland. The Service’s restoration and environmental education experts are assisting the Navy’s natural resources manager by evaluating Navy lands and writing a plan for the future of conservation areas and natural habitats under Navy management.

Greenbury Point, a 231 acre peninsula at the mouth of the Severn River, provides numerous opportunities to integrate wildlife habitat and education with the training mission of the Naval Academy. Outdoor education planners from the Service's Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge are lending their expertise to help shape the Visitor’s Center Environmental Education facility the Navy is currently building on Greenbury Point. Nineteen osprey pairs that currently nest on Greenbury Point’s radio towers will be provided new platforms before the towers are demolished in the coming year.

Another valuable landscape, the Navy’s 850 acre Dairy Farm, is intended to be leased to a private dairy operator in the coming years.Service biologists will recommend enhancements for stream, wetland and hedgerow habitats that will complement agricultural operations. The Dairy Farm is upstream in the drainage network of the wildlife-rich Patuxent River corridor, so enhancing the Dairy Farm creates water quality and wildlife benefits for the larger landscape.