Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary

Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary was officially created as a Anne Arundel County Park in 1985. It started with only 210 acres (including wetlands), and now it has grown to about 1,700 acres. Because it would be difficult to include everything we have seen, experienced, or accomplished over the past 40 years, we tried to mainly focus on the bigger events and highlights of the past five years.

Jug Bay has had the privilege of being a research site for some long-lived data collection projects that have reached across time to provide insights into natural cycles of change. One of our most long-lived and successful projects is our Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship (MAPS) program. We became a MAPS station in 1990, one year after the program began, and are still participating as a site 30 years later. This makes JBWS one of the 13 longest running MAPS sites of the more than 1,200 sites scattered throughout the United States and Canada. MAPS data has been used to publish over 100 scientific papers on bird migration, reproduction and survivorship. In more recent years MAPS data have been used to measure the varying effects of climate change on bird populations. As of 2020, the Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary MAPS program has banded 3,196 birds representing 66 different species. Given the uniqueness of JBWS tidal freshwater marsh habitat there is no doubt these data have provided novel insights to be used by scientists around the globe. This year COVID-19 put a damper on many of our projects and we had to adjust our expectations, so unfortunately our MAPS participation streak was broken. Mist nets are generally set up in late May through July, which happened to be at the height of our increased visitation to the Sanctuary and COVID restrictions. Those two factors presented numerous challenges we were unable to overcome. Fortunately we were still able to conduct some of our other long-term population studies this year. 

In 1995 we began tracking our Eastern Box Turtles. We have since marked 605 Eastern Box Turtles and collected records on over 7,300 sightings in the past 25 years. Some noteworthy turtle tidbits: our oldest male on record is more than 50 years of age! One of our first turtles was recorded near the visitor center and then was not seen again for 20 years, which makes him the most enigmatic and crafty box turtle on our records thus far. We also began banding Northern Saw-whet Owl populations at JBWS in 1995, joining a little over 100 other Project OwlNet sites who hope to gather data on these elusive birds. As a site outside of their yearly range, the data we collect provides scientists with information on migration patterns for these tiny and elusive creatures.