(Sound of rain) [Tom Horton] Soaking mists to gully washing thunderstorms, April showers to autumn nor'easters, rain falls, as it always has.

But the landscapes that receive it, the paths rain takes, the speed at which it runs off have changed dramatically.

(Environmental sounds and music) [Tom] Consider water's way throughout the vast basin of Chesapeake Bay, some 40 rivers and thousands of creeks feeding the great estuary from across nearly a sixth of the East Coast.

This is the watershed.

Every drop of rain that falls on 64,000 square miles heads one way, Bayward.

And the Chesapeake, which appears so long and broad is, in context, just a smallish and shallow pool of water on the receiving end of everything 18 million people in six states and the District of Columbia do with the land, for good or ill. (Traffic noise) Technological controls on Bay pollution from sewage, autos, and factories have made modest progress.

(Environmental sounds) But it is clear this will not be enough to achieve a healthy bay.

Further progress must come from the lands of the watershed, from better understanding what was Water's Way in the Chesapeake basin when the Bay was clearer, cleaner, healthier.

(Music and environmental sounds) [Tom] The title of this film derives from a man who shot a wolf on a mountain in Arizona a century ago.

Also from a beaver I executed much more recently on a tidal tributary of the Chesapeake.

Neither Aldo Leopold nor I, yet grasped the wisdom of the natural landscape.

We did not think ecologically.

Leopold would become known as the father of wildlife ecology.

But back in his trigger-happy days, like most hunters of his era, he thought that fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves at all would mean hunters' paradise.

Years later, he re-evaluated this in a classic essay called "Thinking Like a Mountain."

[Scott McGill] Only the mountain has been around long enough to know what the howl of a wolf really means; that deer run in mortal fear of the wolf, but the mountain is in mortal fear of the deer.

And the idea of that is, that if you take wolves out of the landscape, the deer population increases, and they start to eat everything around them.

And then, hence, we have more erosion, we have less food and cover for other wildlife.

* [Kai Hagen] While, beavers are not predators, you can make a similar argument that preserving a creature that people eradicate is a critical part of preserving a healthy, diverse, rich, biological ecosystem and natural environment.

[Tom] I only saw my hapless beaver as a sharp-toothed rodent chiseling down newly planted trees, threatening to dam up the creek and flood my newly acquired property.

I did not appreciate how her species for thousands of years had transformed the North American and Chesapeake landscape to an extent rivaled only by modern humans, and in a profoundly more affirming way.

I was NOT Thinking Like a Watershed.

Millions of beaver ponds and dams once sponsored a lush mosaic of wetlands throughout the Chesapeake region.

These slowed and spread, and retained water flowing to the Bay from every creek, and river, letting it soak in and percolate through the ground.

[Tom] This Bay of beavers damped the flooding of the fiercest storms, elevated the water table to feed creeks through seeps and springs during the worst droughts, lent a resilience, and stability to the whole system.

[Tom] This pre-colonial landscape was not just greener, more forested than today's; it was wetter, a waterSHED more accurately described as a waterKEEP.

[Tom] And these lavishly, beavered lands afforded splendid habitat, all manner of fish, and fowl, and amphibians.

The water that slowly escaped to the Bay through forests and wetlands was clean and clear beyond present day imagining.

[Tom] Because beavers have been gone so long.

We trapped them out of the Chesapeake watershed by 1750 - there's almost an 'ecological amnesia' as to the benefits they conferred, the world they created, to how the watershed in effect "thought."

Modern humans have thought so very differently.

Creatures of the dry land, we embrace the straight line and live at right angles to the earth.

We pave and channel, ditch and drain.

The faster rain swooshes off our cityscapes and croplands the better-no time for water to soak in, recharge the shallow aquifers.

The upshot has been a massive load of sediments, and fertilizers, and chemicals to the Chesapeake estuary, which has become murky, and devoid in oxygen as a result.

Water's Way gets simplified.

Nature's symphony moves toward single loud notes.

Stability and resilience and biological diversity are diminished.

Flood and drought are exacerbated.

[Man] Get ready and just push.

1-2-3.

[Tom] In the 1970s, Grace Brush, a paleoecologist at the Johns Hopkins University... [Woman] We have a kit that extracts DNA.)

[Tom] ...began to extract yards-long, muddy cylinders from the Bay's bottom sediments, unlocking a whole library of the estuary's past; a record going back a thousand years or more.

[Woman #2] Oh, that's great.

[Grace Brush] Sediment is always being eroded off the land, and it gets deposited in wet areas, ponds, lakes, estuaries, and so on.

And it just piles up year after year, after year, so each one of those layers of sediment contains what I'm calling hieroglyphics here, but they're really actually fossils.

Fossils of small animals, fossils of pollen grains, seeds.

Many, many entities that get preserved in that sediment.

(Environmental sounds) [Tom] At a certain depth in the core, for example, a shift from oak to ragweed pollen corresponded to the beginnings of Colonial agriculture as forests gave way to the axe and the plow.

Similarly, shifts from pollens of swamp plants to dry land plants showed the drying out of the beavered landscape as humans trapped them for fur.

[Grace] After we began to accumulate some evidence from these sediment cores, we began to integrate that into some pictures of what the bay might look like... * ...in the pre-colonial time, it was forested, and it had all of these wet areas, many of them created by these beavers.

By the late 17th to the early 18th century, the beavers were gone.

Then, we get to the late 19th to early 20th century, and that's when 80 percent of the forests were deforested.

[Grace] So, we have a lot more forest now than we had in the early 1900s, but there's still a lot of agricultural land.

And also, paving has started.

So, this land that is not forested is paved.

A lot of hard surfaces, so you're getting a lot more runoff into the Bay.

[Tom] This transformation of its watershed led directly to today's degraded Chesapeake Bay, whose astoundingly shallow water drains a region from New York nearly to North Carolina, and as a result is more impacted by land use than any comparable body of water on earth.

[Grace] Instead of water seeping through a forest floor of litter...and leaves, and twigs...and so on, the water now is just flowing off on these hard surfaces and going into the estuary and carrying with it many, many substances, fertilizers, sediment and so on.

* [Tom] If I were the Choptank, the Eastern Shore's biggest river, it's on Nick Carter's place I'd want to be born, to start my journey to the Bay.

Nick has spent nearly half a century re-naturing his patch of the watershed.

It's one of many places the Choptank gets its start, but it is the very nicest.

Nick DOES think like a watershed.

(Sounds of walking on leaves in rain) [Nick Carter] In fact, you can step off this driveway where we're now walking, step off just a few feet and you'll find how much softer, how much more pervious that ground is.

[Tom] Yeah, you can feel it just as soon as you step off.

[Nick] Exactly.

[Tom] Amazing.

[Nick] This is what the earth ought to feel like without the influences of man.

This is exemplary of everything from the Mississippi to the Atlantic coast as it was before the Europeans got here.

All the tributaries to the Bay were shielded and guarded, and stabilized by the forest.

Without this forest, there's a far greater transmission of water.

The more water you got running off, the more nitrogen you lose, the more phosphorous you lose.

[Tom] The phosphorous and nitrogen in the runoff from the land cause explosive growth of algae in the Bay that blocks light and consumes oxygen, both of these harmful to aquatic life.

Those nutrients, if retained on the land, build fertility, support life in splendid diversity.

[Grace] In those early days before colonization, when we had a very wet watershed, the watershed was taking care of the nitrogen.

It was recycling the nitrogen.

And so, once that was drained, you had all of this nitrogen no longer going back into the atmosphere, but just being washed off into the Bay.

You can cut down a tree, you can plant a new tree, but it's going to be 10-12 years minimum before it's going to produce seeds and start a new generation.

So, the thing that happened with the clearing of the forest was that you had eventually only these organisms - like dandelions on the land - that have a generation time of a year.

So, they'll just come back and come back.

And the same in the water.

The fish and crabs, and so on that have a long generation time, of years...they just can't make it.

They're replaced by these very small organisms, bacteria, diatoms... [Woman] Yeah, these are going to be great.

[Grace] ...and so on, one celled that have a generation time of a day or a few days.

And that was a terrific change.

I said, "This transformation of the land from forests to farms and hard surfaces, and the rapid rate at which it occurred was one of the great ecological phenomena in human history.

It would have enormous repercussions for the estuary that drained these older lands."

So, it was an enormous change in a very short period of time.

[Tom] Development nowadays comes with a host of mandatory controls to mitigate the quantity and quality of the stormwater caused by more paving.

More intense rainfalls driven by climate change lend an urgency to this.

[Tom Schueler] Ellicott City gets a combination of river flooding from the Patapsco River that runs right at the toe of it, but it also has watershed flooding from the three-square miles of urban development upstream.

6 and 2018, of rainfall in less than two hours in each case.

They were thunderstorms that just kept training over the same area.

(rushing water and rain) And the streams couldn't handle it.

And so, it went overground and ran down the street to a depth of 5-6 feet, washing hundreds of cars into the Patapsco and regrettably, the loss of several lives between the two floods.

It devastated the downtown business district and closed for many months while they were trying to repair the basic infrastructure.

[Tom] Hiking the slopes above Ellicott City, Schueler explains how local development has degraded a small stream and contributed to the flooding.

[Schueler] If you have really good eyes you can see a sewer manhole stack in the foreground right there, which was never intended to be put in the middle of the stream.

So, all that sediment and erosion has eroded, and gone down to the river.

Again, being pushed by that powerful force of urban storm water.

And this sort of single thread stream that we see in modern times is not what we would see back then.

We'd see a multiple thread stream with a lot of different shoots and things like that.

A lot of our scientists are revealing to us what those historic streams were like that are just a lot different from what we see in 2021.

[Liz Walsh] So, we're on the banks of the New Cut now.

And this gives you a good sense of what we contend with here in the watershed, which is a willingness to pave and develop right up to almost the very banks of these streams as they descend down into Main Street, Ellicott City.

And maybe one or two developments that doesn't make a difference.

But this is a death by 1,000 cuts.

A thousand new cuts on this New Cut Branch.

And the consequence of that over and over again, along the length of every single one of these streams that ends and bottoms on Main Street is devastating.

There is a fatalistic approach to the Old Ellicott City watershed, that is we have destroyed this watershed to such an extent that you should allow us to continue to destroy that last little bit of it that's left.

Those last forested acres, those last steep slopes, that last stream bank that's not already scoured, covered in riprap, destroyed, that non-functional flood plain.

[Schueler] As we studied a lot of streams, we realized that very low levels of impervious cover, somewhere around five to 10 percent in a watershed, was enough to begin degrading and diminishing the quality of urban streams.

And to put 10 percent in perspective, that's pretty rural development, like one-acre lot subdivisions.

And after about 25 percent impervious cover, much of stream health degrades completely, and we call them non supporting streams.

Baltimore, or Washington, D.C. are like, 70-80 percent impervious cover.

Again, that iron law of imperviousness is very hard to repeal.

The sheer magnitude of the impacts are really hard to fix with one practice.

And so, we have to take more of a holistic watershed approach where we try to restore all the elements that make that aquatic ecosystem work.

The riparian forests, the wetlands along the stream corridor, in some cases the stream itself.

So that's kind of the challenge that we face now in the next generation of how we can bring back our urban streams and make better progress against the ravages of impervious cover.

[Tom] Agricultural lands across the Bay watershed have shrunk dramatically, often because of development, in the last century.

But the 'intensity' of farming has leaped, as chemical fertilizers, pesticides and weedkillers per acre have multiplied; also manure from animal operations that have grown larger and more concentrated.

The sheer extent of agriculture and its intensity have made it the single largest source of Bay pollution.

In recent decades, farmers have begun to surround their fields with forested buffers and wetlands and border their ditches with vegetative cover to intercept the movement of sediment, manure, and chemicals into waterways.

Yeah, I'm Trey Hill.

I own and operate Harborview Farms with my father.

We have farms that we till in Talbot County, Kent, and Cecil Counties.

I'm a strong believer in the buffers.

The buffer is trying to take land out of production that's really close to environmentally sensitive areas.

The easiest example of that would be like, you're farming next to a river.

What the conservation service has done, they'll pay us rent on land, if we take a certain amount of that out of production.

And what they'll do is they'll also pay us to plant native vegetation, switchgrass, big bluestem, little bluestem, things like that, that have really deep root systems.

And we don't fertilize it, so it's a wildlife habitat.

But also when anything comes off the field, it acts as a filter before it goes to the river.

[Tom] Winter plantings of so-called 'cover crops' is another practice farmers are adopting to reduce runoff.

Cover crops are sown to suck up fertilizers still in the shallow groundwater after cash crops are harvested, to keep nitrogen and phosphorus from running into the Bay.

Similarly, planting without plowing to minimize runoff is becoming widespread.

[Trey] Since, agriculture first started, people have tilled the soil to take care of weeds.

In other words, when you run a rotary hoe in your garden, for example.

Now, when we plant our crops, we don't do that at all.

We plant into soil just as it is.

And by not loosening that soil, by not disturbing it, we get a lot less erosion, and a lot less runoff.

Yeah, people ask me, "How much farther can we go?

How much better can we be at environmental cleanup?"

And it's easy for me to think that we've finished, right?

We're at the end of the road, like we've done everything we can do.

But then, I think back to when I was 30 and I thought the same thing.

And the way I farm now is completely different than I did 15 years ago.

So, all I can do is hope that 15 years from now, I'm farming completely different than I am now.

* [Judy Gifford] My husband, Robert Fry, and I run St. Brigid's Farm in Kent County, Kennedyville, Maryland.

It's 62 acres.

We milk 60 Jersey cows with a robot, which we put in three years ago.

When we bought the farm, it was all in wheat and it had been rotational standard wheat-bean-corn system.

We tried to grow some corn silage for a year, grew some annuals but after many failed attempts, we decided to put everything into permanent pasture.

And everybody knows that permanent pasture is the best practice for water quality and erosion control.

And so, you have a living root, year-round.

There's no bare soil.

If there's a water event, we have a culvert that goes down along our fence line, and you can literally see the water from our land is clear and the water from the tilled, the ground is brown.

And it's clear as day.

We have about 19 paddocks in this section of field, about a little over 20 acres.

So, the reason to separate the paddocks is to promote soil health really.

You don't want to have the cows grazing on the new growth all the time.

We've just been destroying soil for years.

We haven't been replenishing soil.

When my dad was farming in the '50s, they never talked about it.

And it's only been recent that people started talking about soil health.

(Okay let's go.)

The economic system in which we are working rewards uniformity, simplicity, speed, and size.

It doesn't reward supporting beaver dams.

It doesn't reward doing things to get more birds on your farm.

So, the wrong things are being rewarded in our system.

[Tom] Some of the earliest signs of agriculture's impact on the Bay in Grace Brush's sediment cores involved ditching to drain croplands, turning streams and swamps into straight channels designed for a single purpose.

[Grace] It was amazing that, that pollen changed from totally wet plants to almost entirely dry plants almost immediately at the time of colonization.

The land became dry very quickly.

And that's when I began to look at the ditches.

That changed the land very, very quickly and also changed the water very quickly, because then you got all this stuff coming into the Bay very, very quickly.

[Tim Rosen] Generally, farmers like to see water move off the land, but in a ditch project like this, we're trying to do both.

So, it's designed in a way to hold and convey water in a way that doesn't hurt crops growing while also achieves our water quality and also habitat goals.

I mean, we're literally 500 yards from an active farm field and transitioning from a ditch to a natural stream channel.

(Environmental sounds) [Tom] I often take my students on a special part of the Nanticoke River to illustrate waters way, the human approach versus nature's.

The river, one of the wildest and loveliest in the Bay, begins as a man-made ditch, constructed to perform one vital duty, quickly draining stormwater off the flat corn and bean fields of the watershed.

We're just now leaving the ditch, the straight line, the single purpose, just beginnings of seeing nature reassert itself.

But where ditch maintenance stops, the universal tendency of free-flowing water to wander, to curve and loop quickly asserts itself.

You see how those branches start to catch debris and that'll form a little jut-out that will cause the water to start to bend and start to return it to its natural shape.

Here, the meandering, complex river serves no one purpose--just promotes life in all its beauty and diversity.

Nature comes back pretty quick, if you let it go.

* Not far off, on the Pocomoke River, there's been another encouraging reconciliation.

This impressive restoration by The Nature Conservancy, along with state and federal agencies, has leveled old dikes to reconnect the river with nearly seven square miles of floodplain wetlands, humans acting like beavers, spreading the water out, letting it take its time to the Bay.

[Mike Dryden] So, the goal is to bring the flood plain elevation, which is back here, straight across, so when we get the storm events, the water has the opportunity to go into the flood plain, filter in there during the event.

So, the breaches act as an inlet-outlet during the storm events.

It was channelized in the '30s and '40s for agriculture purposes, so that the farmers in the area could drain their ag fields quicker.

We're allowing it to kind of to act and meander like it did once 70 years ago.

You know, we're permanently protecting land, we're increasing habitat, we're increasing water quality.

So, everything that had the opportunity to go out to the Bay before - now has the chance to come in here and filtrate before it gets into our system and outlets into the Chesapeake.

[Tom] Another example of helping water relearn its natural ways is on the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center's large tract of forest and wetlands on the Rhode River south of Annapolis, MD.

[Tom Jordan] So, this is Muddy Creek, the north end of Muddy Creek.

This channel here was deeply incised.

It was cut down.

It looked like a drainage ditch.

In some places there were 10 or 12 feet between the flood plain and the bottom of this stream channel.

And the reason it got eroded like that is because of the single culvert that carries the water under the road.

And you can see it looks like a big pool; before it looked like a drainage ditch.

There's a berm that's been constructed just downstream of me and that now deflects the water out over this flood plain.

And this part was dry before and now it's a wetland.

* [Tom] About 80 percent of all development out there has been already done with poor environmental practices.

We've been spending millions and millions every year to restore this, restore the streams, retrofit stormwater practices, create wetlands, get back some of those habitat features we lost.

[Schueler] It's a slow chugging train.

It's a huge job.

It's multi-billions and multi-decades to do.

[Tom] Meanwhile, we keep developing.

[Nick] We don't need expensive programs to save the land in the bay.

You just need a whole lot less people doing a whole lot less modification of the land.

What we let this land do is about as low budget as you can possibly get, because it didn't cost us a nickel to let this forest grow back up.

* [Tom] We've lost more than half the Chesapeake's original wetlands, lost some 40 percent of its forests.

Forests and wetlands are the watershed's least polluting land uses, and they're just beautiful.

But thinking like a watershed doesn't stop at the water's edge.

On the Bay's bottom, the remaining one percent of oysters are nowadays valued for their services to clean water and provide habitat in the reefs they build, no longer just regarded for the price they fetch per bushel.

Similarly, remaining meadows of underwater seagrasses that struggle for light in the modern, murky Bay are now prized for providing oxygen and for nurturing a variety of aquatic life, including blue crabs who seek their protection to moult and grow.

But putting all these ecosystem valuations into protective, restorative actions remains very much a work in progress, not nearly enough.

Restoration goals set by federal and state governments throughout the Bay watershed were badly missed in 2010.

The revised deadlines set for 2025 are by no means assured of success.

The solutions going forward will increasingly lie with the land, with learning to think like a watershed, with relearning water's old ways, rather than pushing it rapidly away, downstream.

In reconfiguring the landscape, in the way it sheds water-- slowly, leanly, cleanly, clearly--lies the Bay's future.

Lies our future.

* Could a small-brained, compulsive rodent, Castor canadensis, the beaver, be a key?

[Scott] So, we're in the Long Green Creek watershed in Baltimore County.

It flows to the lower Gunpowder and eventually the Lower Gunpowder flows into the Chesapeake Bay.

In 1993, this valley was a cow pasture, virtually no trees in sight.

There was no shade for the stream.

The banks on the stream were eroding in a sort of an accelerated fashion.

So, we got some small grants to do some live staking where we put willows and dogwoods into the stream banks, and some of them would sprout, and turn into trees.

And way back when, we didn't know it, but that was going to be beaver food later on as those willows matured.

We put an easement on this ground.

The landowners set this aside as a natural area.

For years after that, they would trap the beaver out because they thought that you know, the beaver eating the trees was a bad thing.

Over time, what we all started to find out was that if you left the beaver alone there was so much more wildlife here.

That's why you call beaver a keystone species.

Everything else benefits by allowing the beaver to come in and alter the landscape.

We installed a flow management device which allowed some control to the landowners about how deep this water was going to get and how high the dams were going to get.

So, it gave them some control, reduced the flooding on the farm road.

And over the last three years, we've seen this area transform again and again and again as the beavers increased their numbers and make this habitat you know, what you see today, which is really sort of a Narnia type wetland for wildlife.

* [Kai] I live in the Catoctin Mountains of Northern Frederick County.

We're at 1500 feet elevation here.

The first beaver arrived in March, four years ago, and that was Herbert.

And the first evidence was a little dam where the pond overflows.

(laughs) Fourteen months after he got here, a beaver came dashing out of the thicket into the wetland into the pond, and I thought, "That's not the way Herbert would normally act."

Later on we realized that was the female, we named her Sherbert.

The next spring, they had three baby beavers in the lodge they built over there.

And last year, they had three more babies in the lodge they had on the island in this pond.

From the very beginning of Herbert arriving here, You know, I posted pictures of Herbert and then Herbert and Sherbert, then the babies.

I tell you, as much as I wish that my posts on climate change and other things got as much attention as those do, they have been the most popular thing that I post for the most part.

There are just so many benefits to having beavers for wildlife, for water quality.

They catch a tremendous amount of sediment that would otherwise get to the Monocacy River or the Bay.

They clean and filter water, they help to recharge groundwater which keeps springs active and flowing for more of the year because of that.

When we create a world that's better for beavers, it has tremendous ancillary benefits and impacts for human communities and society.

[Jordan] I'm looking out at this beautiful pond that was created in 1990 by some beavers that moved in unexpectedly and built a dam.

And they're long gone, but the pond remains.

And we discovered that the pond and the beaver dam were stopping nutrients and sediments from going down the stream.

Because we have a stream monitoring station.

That monitoring station was running since the mid 1970s.

The beaver dam was built in 1990, fifteen years after we started monitoring.

And then we waited another 5 or 10 years and looked at the data and we could see the effects of the dam from comparing before and after.

And this pond is still here.

* [Tom] Living with beavers can take some effort.

[Allie Tyler] My wife, Cleo Braver and I moved here in around 1997 from Baltimore and just fell in love with the place.

We put in 18 acres of wetlands and 20 acres to border the fields, and then turned it into an organic vegetable operation.

Let a lot of the property essentially go back to nature.

The pond that we're by, right here, was here when we got here.

It's full of fish and attracted a lot of wildlife and eventually attracted some beavers.

We first started noticing small trees disappearing, and every now and then, a little bit of a larger tree and then we spotted them.

The pipe is to keep the pond at a certain level and keep it from overflowing in big rain, and as I understand, there's only one thing a beaver can't stand, and that's flowing water.

(laughs) So, he would continue to block the pipe, I would unblock it.

They would block it.

I would unblock it...so far, I've been keeping score.

I think, it's beavers about a hundred and Allie about zero.

We actually enjoy having the beavers here and watching what they do.

They're incredible little creatures and incredibly busy.

[Tom] There's other resistance to beavers.

Trout enthusiasts, as one example, worry that beaver ponds will raise temperatures in the cold water that their favorite sport species requires.

[Scott] As opposed to dams that we would build, beaver dams are generally porous, so you've got water coming out of the bottom.

You've got water coming out of the middle.

You've got these side channels which are great for fish passage.

So, fish evolved with these beaver dams in place, so they're able to find these little nooks and crannies through the dam.

You can even kinda shoot your hand all the way through and get to the other side.

So, salmon and trout and other species of fish can get through these dams.

And you know, these gravels below the dam, this is a great spot for spawning.

So, I'm hoping that this dam increases in size over time, and what's that's going to do is shoot water out over a greater width and spread this energy out even more.

* [Kai] There's a lot of places in Frederick County where beavers would happily move into.

Streams that they would dam, ponds that they would move into, but there's a difference between that and places where people welcome them or co-exist with them.

And so, there's only two ways that, that can happen.

One is that you have areas that are big enough and wild enough, so that beaver activity is part of a bigger landscape in a 5,000, or 10,000, acre park or something like that, or people choose to put some effort into co-existing with them.

And that's what we've done here.

Between this area near our house and pond and over where the other three ponds are, between this method, some other methods and chicken wire, I've probably saved about 500 or 600 trees from the beavers.

So, it's basically, kind of the deal we've struck with the beaver, like although really he's sort of forced to comply.

I saved two trees, which I walk by all the time, so I can reinforce it more if I need to, and they get all the rest of the beech trees right around here.

[Tom] If we give beavers the space, practice peaceful coexistence, they will repay the favor with a better Bay than humans alone could ever achieve or afford.

It is no stretch to imagine a science-based formula for giving pollution credits or cash payments to landowners who welcome beavers.

[Scott] We're on Windlass Run in Baltimore County.

This is an urban watershed, seen a lot of development in the watershed over the last 20 years.

The beaver may have come in from the Bay, they may have come in from White Marsh Run.

But they found this habitat ideal.

And as you can see, they've made quite a home here.

The pond is 10 to 20 acres in size.

Think about it.

This pond treats all this urban runoff, all the same runoff that we're spending millions, if not billions of dollars to try to mitigate, and improve water quality in the Chesapeake Bay.

And the beavers are here doing a lot of that heavy lifting for us for free.

And it makes a lot of sense to me as you know, someone who's been in the restoration practice for the last 30 years that maybe the answer to restoring the bay doesn't include a lot of rocks and logs and manmade ponds, but just sort of honoring the ecosystem services of this furry little rodent who used to be here in the millions, but was trapped out you know...way back when, before any of us ecologists were walking around the landscape taking notes.

So, if you think about it, you know...beavers are really they're really a big part of our history in this country, but they're not part of our culture.

* [Tom] Learning to appreciate and live with a creature whose ecological vision diverges from our own will require us to think more like a watershed, to understand what was once water's preferred way upon and through the landscape, and how that translated into a Chesapeake now imperiled by near amnesia of what once was.

A Chesapeake also that will increasingly need more stability and resilience across its landscapes to offset the ever-wilder swings of flood and drought that will come with climate change, and the impacts of a population we blithely assume can keep growing without limits.

* Aldo Leopold in his book "Sand County Almanac," published back in the 1940s, worried about the trend of a nation newly in love with the automobile to thrust roads into the loveliest parts of the American wilderness.

Far better, he said, "To build appreciation for unspoiled wilderness into the still unlovely human mind."

Just so with learning to appreciate and emulate water's way upon a once and perhaps future Chesapeake.

If we can learn to develop in ways that let water soak in; minimize farm runoff into our rivers and streams; reconnect our ditches and stream channels to their broader floodplains, let water spread out, meander more as nature intended, then we might, just might, experience once again a watershed resilient to flood and drought and a Chesapeake clean and clear.

Singin' a Susquehanna, Wicomico, South, Severn, Nanticoke, Choptank and Elk, we're born of Potomac out of ol' Shenandoah, York, Rappahannock, and James.

York, Rappahannock, and James.

* * Long before I was made in the depths of the Earth, * * You have my (inaudible) fashioned my birth.

* * With a passion to journey out over the sea, * * This vision, flowin' and free.

* * * This dark fertile land will surely reveal * * A place to believe the passions revealed.

* * The wings of the morning, the cup of his hand, * * Nourish the longing in this dark river land.

* * Nourish the longing in this dark river land.

* * * Singin' a Susquehanna, Wicomico, * * South, Severn, Nanticoke, Choptank and Elk, * * We're born of Potomac out of ol' Shenandoah, * * And York, Rappahannock, and James.

* * York, Rappahannock, and James.

* * * Singin' a Susquehanna, Wicomico, * * South, Severn, Nanticoke, Choptank and Elk, * * We're born of Potomac out of ol' Shenandoah, * * And York, Rappahannock, and James.

* * York, Rappahannock, and James.

*