ANNOUNCER: This program is made by MPT to enrich the diverse communities throughout our state and is made possible by the generous support of our members.

Thank you.

NARRATOR: Coming up little birds in the big city, delicacies of the fall woods.

JARED: Look at this chonker.

And collecting Maryland's natural wonders.

Next.

Outdoors Maryland is produced in cooperation with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.

(upbeat music) ♪ ♪ (soothing music) NARRATOR: In the darkening September sky, hundreds of tiny birds swirl above a towering industrial chimney at the old Free State Book Bindery in Hampden Baltimore.

Chimney Swifts, a migratory species evolved to roost in hollow trees, but as the name suggests, they've adapted, paying a predictable visit each fall to chimneys like this one during their long journey south for the winter.

And each fall, spectators meet them here to enjoy the show.

But while these unique birds find a safe haven in Baltimore's industrial smokestacks...the concrete jungle offers a perilous pit stop for many wild winged travelers, its modern glass buildings acting as a mirror-like house of horrors.

LINDSAY JACKS: They teeter from one tree to another tree foraging for food, hanging out, and then they just smack into windows and glass because they don't know that that's just a reflection.

NARRATOR: That's why throughout the migratory season, self-proclaimed bird nerd Lindsay Jacks oversees a team of volunteers on a mission of mercy.

Before the sun rises and the commuter rush takes hold, they patrol the streets.

LINDSAY: So, we're just walking right now to see if we can find any injured birds or find any birds that may have died by hitting buildings.

NARRATOR: They hike about two and a half miles searching for crash victims at the base of 20 or so buildings downtown.

LINDSAY: Sure, you want to do a picture and I'll start a tag.

NARRATOR: Logging details, species, age, sex, and bagging birds to share with national researchers.

WOMAN: You know some of these birds are going all the way to South America.

They have such a long way to go and it's so sad to think that their journey was ended just by hitting a building in downtown Baltimore.

NARRATOR: This somber census can take a toll.

LINDSAY: Isn't it beautiful?

Sometimes, you hold in your hand a dead bird that you've never seen in the wild or very briefly seen in the wild.

That gets kind of emotional.

At the same time, you also know that collecting that dead bird is important data to kind of depict how many birds are coming downtown and just aren't making it out.

NARRATOR: Every spring and fall, hundreds of species, millions of individuals fly into Baltimore, situated along a migratory corridor known as the Mid-Atlantic Flyway.

(soft rippling music) Many of these, nighttime travelers guided in their journeys by the moon and stars, and easily led astray by light pollution.

♪ ♪ Enter the volunteer group led by Lindsay, a nonprofit project of the Baltimore Bird Club dubbed Lights Out Baltimore.

Their efforts extend beyond these daily patrols.

LINDSAY: We ask businesses and even homeowners to turn off non-essential lighting during migration seasons.

Some of the sky scrapers here in the city, they have 20 floors.

All 20 floors are lit up, and as all 20 floors are lit up, that's attracting the birds in.

NARRATOR: Along the inner harbor, the National Aquarium cooperates, dimming its lights as the city sleeps.

The building also includes glass patterns, which like bird safe decals can minimize collisions.

In 10 years, Lights Out volunteers have collected 5,000 dead birds...but they also saved 2000, most severely injured.

LINDSAY: Any adult bird that you can walk up to and approach and it does not fly away needs help.

Very easily, we just put the net over them and we scoop them up and put them in a paper bag.

Oh, he's lively.

That's good.

NARRATOR: Today's tally: 20 dead, but four rescues.

Back in Hampden, dusk falls and locals gather for the chimney swifts' nightly show, an outing also organized by the Baltimore Bird Club.

ALICE: Hi everybody.

NARRATOR: This evening's MC: club member Alice Greely-Nelson.

ALICE GREELY-NELSON: I have a few flyers here explaining the bird's migrational patterns and their habits.

If you have any questions, I am going to be sitting over here counting the chimney swifts.

NARRATOR: She's been counting these birds every spring and autumn for more than 20 years.

ALICE: The chimney swifts is fascinating to me because they're community birds.

I love their chittering noise.

(bird chittering) NARRATOR: As the birds begin their descent, Alice and her husband David stand with clickers at the ready.

(gentle strumming music) ALICE: So, we're counting by tens.

Sometimes, it can take 15 minutes.

Sometimes, it takes as little as five minutes.

Sometimes, it can take a half an hour, but they're very haphazard tonight.

NARRATOR: Unfortunately, that's nothing new.

Over the decades, Alice has watched as even these birds, a species so well adapted to the landscapes of the industrial revolution have struggled to keep pace with the rate of urban change as old chimneys are torn down or capped.

ALICE: Both of their habitats are disappearing, manmade as well as natural.

The chimney swifts have been decreasing in numbers.

We've counted 7,000 in the chimney and they're down to about 3000.

NARRATOR: Even so, the scene leaves onlookers awestruck, a sense of wonder that saved this particular chimney for the moment...as neighborhood advocates like Alice fought to keep the swifts' local safe haven intact in the face of planned development.

ALICE: I counted 1,550.

Losing that chimney would be really hard.

It would make me very sad.

NARRATOR: Surviving today's modern environment can be a struggle.

Animals of all sorts sometimes need a helping hand.

The kind wildlife rehabber Kathy Woods provides.

KATHY WOODS: They get fed twice a day, NARRATOR: Nursing the injured back to health.

The goal: return them to the wild.

That's why this small house in the woods, the Phoenix Wildlife Center is the ideal infirmary for Lights Out Baltimore rescues, complete with its own bird safe decals.

The morning's four rescues will receive special care for their injuries.

WOMAN: We got a few sparrows.

KATHY: We monitor them for generally two or three days to look for eye injuries.

They get fluids and they get fed whatever their proper diet would be to not lose any weight while they're on migration.

NARRATOR: If all goes well in a few days Kathy will upgrade the paper bag for a cardboard box, walk out to the woods and let them go.

Like, this swamp Sparrow now a discharged patient.

(soft music) KATHY: He's been here a couple of days and I'm really excited for him to get back on his journey.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Thanks to the Lights Out Baltimore team and their efforts to make this city a welcoming environment for all.

LINDSAY: I love Baltimore City.

It's where I work and live and I want to be able to say that it is actually birdland.

It's bird safe.

(upbeat music) ♪ ♪ NARRATOR: From tiny toad stools to shelf like polypores, the damp fall woods are a mushroom lover's paradise, and on a brisk October afternoon... JARED: Super sticky.

It's awful.

It's great.

NARRATOR: Mycology expert Jared Urchek leads a group of eager gatherers at Catoctin Quaker camp in Frederick County.

JARED URCHEK: The world of mushrooms is massive.

It's convoluted, it's complicated.

There are certain things that are beautiful edibles, and then there are poisonous things that look almost exactly like the edible sometimes, right?

What do we do when there's an overwhelming insurmountable amount of knowledge?

You just take it step by step.

NARRATOR: Today's foray is part of an ethical foraging program sponsored by nonprofit Learning Center, Fox Haven Farm, JARED: Different years and you'll see totally different things fruiting in the same space because the conditions are always different.

NARRATOR: Sheltered beneath a grove of oak trees, this group learns how to retrieve and classify fungi, discerning whether they're tasty or toxic.

JARED: There's this bit of flesh that's encasing the bottom right.

That's your sign of danger.

NARRATOR: There's the medicinal turkey tail adorned in the same rich browns and blacks as the eponymous bird and the corsage like, hen of the woods.

JARED: Look at this chonker.

NARRATOR: A choice edible.

So-called for its resemblance to a hen perched atop her nest.

Perhaps the most fervent fungi fanatic of the bunch is 7-year-old Max Merino.

MAX MERINO: Mycelium actually helps trees swap nutrients with another tree that's in danger.

And that's all thanks to mushrooms.

NARRATOR: But not all Maryland mushrooms have such a symbiotic relationship with their plant hosts.

In fact, some of the tastiest are parasites like this chicken of the woods.

It's past its prime... JARED: And I'll just take the tender tips, NARRATOR: But it provides a relevant teaching moment about foraging sustainably.

JARED: I would feel okay about harvesting the growing edge of all of this and leaving 80 percent of it because then it will indeterminately start growing back.

NARRATOR: While, today's foray is all in good fun, for most of human history, foraging equaled survival.

Here in the Chesapeake region.

It was a way of life for not only Native Americans, but also colonists and enslaved people who relied on the bounty of the landscape to supplement an often meager diet.

HANNAH VEGA: Foraging has been something that has been a part of the Black community since we came here, just something that we had to do.

NARRATOR: An avid gardener Bowie resident Hannah Vega grows rosemary and basil in her backyard.

HANNAH: I just love the way it smells, NARRATOR: But she doesn't limit her harvest to cultivated crops.

HANNAH: This is one of my personal favorites.

This is wild violet leaf.

You can use it, eat it raw in a salad, but it can also be used as medicine.

Through listening to stories for my mother who would tell me about people in my lineage who knew how to identify plants, that created a curiosity in me to want to do it myself.

NARRATOR: Hannah even documents her foraging expeditions online through her Instagram account Afroforagers.

Just weeks ago, she harvested from these paw trees in a nearby woodland.

By October, the branches of North America's largest native fruit bear only leaves, but there are still plenty of palatable plants to be found.

The aptly named goldenrod, a member of the sunflower family.

HANNAH: It's really beneficial for immune health.

You can make a tincture out of it.

NARRATOR: And multi-flora rose, a large shrub bearing a bounty of tiny rose hips, high in vitamin C. HANNAH: A lot of people have this misconception that, oh, it grows in the woods.

It must taste like grass or must taste like weeds, and that's simply just not true.

There are so many things that grow in the wild for free that can be used.

NARRATOR: If you ask Hannah, access is key to foraging, but many spaces are off limits.

Following the Civil War, even as many formerly enslaved people eked out their livings off the bounties of their local landscapes, governments began to pass laws limiting access to public lands.

HANNAH: There are still barriers to foraging for indigenous people, for Black people, for all people, and I feel that gathering food, I think there should be less barriers to that, and so I would like to see more flexibility there, so more people can harvest from their local parks.

My plan and my goal is to just bring more visibility to Black people and indigenous people who are foragers and to really create a space for us to really communicate together and to share what we're doing in the foraging community.

(brisk music) ♪ ♪ NARRATOR: For chef Jonathan Till foraging is less communal than an effort to embrace solitude.

Almost two decades ago, he found his first chanterelle mushroom as a culinary student in Vermont.

He's been a foraging apostle ever since.

JONATHAN TILL: Being a chef working 70, a hundred hours a week, it was really hard for me to find the time to get out and enjoy nature a little bit, so I forced myself to make the time and incorporate it into my cooking.

NARRATOR: On a midweek outing in Gaithersburg under the threat of rain, he's on the hunt for ingredients, wild garlic mustard, an invasive species, wild spice berries.

JONATHAN: They taste and smell a lot like a cross between allspice and black pepper.

NARRATOR: And field garlic.

Today, a meal for one...prepared al fresco.

He's frying up rillettes using Sika deer he hunted weeks ago on Maryland's Eastern Shore.

JONATHAN: They're a miniature elk, but they are quite delicious.

The spice berry really comes through.

Maryland is rich in resources for a foraging chef because it has abundance of forest.

Plants grow with certain trees.

Mushrooms also grow with certain trees, so you need to find areas that have a harmonious relationship.

MAX: Hen of the woods.

If it's white, then it's edible, but if it's not and it changed color, it's kind of starting to rot.

NARRATOR: Back at Catoctin plates at the ready, it's time to taste the mushrooms gathered by today's class.

JARED: It has a little bit of a ring zone to it as well.

You see that?

NARRATOR: For young Max, each new forage only whets his appetite for more according to his mother Agatha Campos.

AGATHA CAMPOS: Mom, let's do this.

Mom, let's figure this out.

Or Mom, what can we do?

Like, where can we forage?

JOE MCSHARRY: So, beautiful.

JARED: You can actually see the spores on the stem.

There's another one there.

NARRATOR: As for the state's veteran foragers, Jared, Hannah, and Jonathan, Maryland's ever shifting seasons, ripe with a constant promise of something new, provide endless opportunities to explore their own childlike wonder and to connect to the land, to their heritage, and to each other.

(sonorous music) ♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Along the exposed face of a long abandoned railway cut a small crew clambers over steep gravel slopes.

TRENT SPIELMAN: This by far isn't an easy site.

NARRATOR: The rhythmic clank of metal against stone forming a steady soundtrack as they begin their search for ancient treasures.

JOE: You got a lot of stuff in there... NARRATOR: Fossils.

TRENT: This is what they call basically a bedding plane where all the animals settled to the ocean floor.

NARRATOR: Some 400 million years ago, this now solid shale was a fine-grained silt deposited at the bottom of a shallow sea.

Trent Spielman has been hunting this history since childhood.

TRENT: Allegany county's really rich with fossils.

There's about 50 species of brachiopods, the little sea shell type things, five or six kinds of coral.

It was the earliest explosion of life in the oceans.

The main thing that we're looking for are trilobites, which were one of the most advanced arthropods at the time.

NARRATOR: Tiny needles in a large crumbling haystack.

But Trent is known for his keen eye.

TRENT: Got one.

This little guy.

It's the tail section, the little flipper tail section of a trilobite.

I'm going to set it right over here for now, NARRATOR: Untouched for millions of years, and here on this exposed face, it may well have eroded away, but for the determination of these primordial pickers, members of the Natural History Society of Maryland, SAM GLASSCOCK: A lot of the times if you find good fossils, they'll be sort of on these flat planes.

And so, I've probably dug through a couple hundred pounds of rock, and I have found this one about one inch fossil.

VALERIE HORN: In any work of craft, you see the maker and you see the maker 400 million years ago in these fossils.

You want to know what happened in the world?

You want to know the history of the world?

This is it.

Look at it, learn from it.

NARRATOR: Today's fossil foray isn't about personal trophies, but rather preserving the lessons embedded in these fragile time capsules, which are bound for a nondescript building on the outskirts of Baltimore.

CHARLIE DAVIS: Welcome to the Natural History Society.

(enchanting music) NARRATOR: Inside, a repository of Maryland biodiversity...birds, plants... CHARLIE: This particular one was collected in Anne Arundel County, May 12th, 1900.

NARRATOR: ...minerals.

And then...of course, there's the elephant in the room.

CHARLIE: This room looks a mess at the moment because we're actually assembling an incredible display of a wooly mammoth... NARRATOR: Part of a new exhibit on ice age Maryland.

Botanist Charlie Davis is the de-facto historian for the society, which was founded in 1929.

CHARLIE: Look at this thing.

This is the cranium, meaning the back part of the skull of a whale.

The very early days of the Natural history society, the intent, you look back through the notes, the intent was to create something like the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

It would be the American Museum of Natural History of Baltimore, is their big idea that they had.

NARRATOR: By 1936, there was a small public museum at the Maryland Zoo and society organized expeditions to collect in various places around the state.

Some of these early finds still sit proudly in cabinets at the current location in Overlea.

Other items found their way here from outside sources: donated private collections and some unusual standalones.

CHARLIE: This cabinet contains 46 species of birds that are found within Maryland.

It's very typical of the time of 1850 where birds would be shot, mounted, and used as displays in houses.

This was all prior to the Migratory Bird Act that prevents that now.

NARRATOR: It's a glimpse into how the collection of nature has changed over time.

Downstairs, snakes, turtles, and salamanders in jars illustrate the same.

Many gathered during an atlas of Maryland species conducted in the 1960s and '70s.

CHARLIE: Today, we wouldn't do a survey like this.

This though allows a future scientist to actually confirm that we actually did see this particular species.

When you visit a museum, most of what you're seeing is the outer museum.

In our basement is the inner museum.

The inner museum is where the scientific collections are kept.

NARRATOR: Jim Young is the entomology curator.

JIM YOUNG: We also have a lot of the tiger beetles that used to be present in Maryland, very restricted in their distribution now.

NARRATOR: Overseeing a collection of more than 20,000 insects.

JIM: I think entomology is interesting largely because of the diversity.

It's two thirds of the life on the planet wrapped up in these tiny little things that fit in the drawers nicely, and you can study them and they preserve very well.

NARRATOR: Most specimens carefully pinned and labeled with precisely when and where they were collected.

JIM: Mr. Bryant was an avid collector in his own porch light.

The only downside is he only collected at his house, so he only ever put a date on.

So, when we go to incorporate this into the collection, we actually have to make a complete set of labels with his address on it.

NARRATOR: Data that enables researchers to track how distributions have changed over time.

JIM: So, this is the regal fritillary.

This used to be somewhat common in our area.

It's a large, very attractive butterfly.

NARRATOR: Today, it's considered locally extinct.

JIM: They are completely gone.

We can go through the collection and databasing and capturing all of that label data, where they were found and what dates so we can start connecting the dots.

Hopefully that'll tell us a little bit more of the story of what happened and how quickly they left the area.

NARRATOR: These timestamps could also help scientists monitor the spread of invasives like this yellow underwing moth and similar info could help predict the ecological impacts of climate change.

But each insect, each fossil, each mammoth bone here is much more than just a data point.

CHARLIE: All these items in the building represent an individual's interest and curiosity about something that they saw in nature.

NARRATOR: Part of the society's larger mission involves spreading that curiosity to a new generation.

MATT: At each table, you have a bin that contains 18 fossils.

Please take them out.

Okay?

We want you to be able to take a closer look at 'em.

NARRATOR: Each winter, science resource teachers, Matt Budinger... MATT BUDINGER: These fossils have shown us that you had this ancient ocean.

NARRATOR: And Joe Davis lead a mobile fossil program for Baltimore County eighth graders with a little help from the Natural History Society.

JOE: Somehow, they got my name.

I'm not even sure how that happened, and they donated literally hundreds and hundreds of fossils that we then organized into kits, so that the kids could actually really pick up and hold specimens that are millions of years old, and really just kind of bring some of that to life.

NARRATOR: Today, they're at Dumbarton Middle School.

JOE: We bring stereo microscopes, we have digital scopes, they can hook up to their laptops, they can take digital pictures.

STUDENT: Wow, It kind of looks like a unicorn horn.

JOE: The kids appreciate learning about Maryland.

It's really cool, I think for kids to know that these fossils came from not so far from their own home, and they could very easily go and find their own.

So, we're just trying to support that interest.

NARRATOR: An interest that will hopefully evolve into something much stronger.

CHARLIE: Part of the effort is cultivating love, and that may seem like an odd thing to say, but fundamentally, that's the bottom line of why we're here because people won't take care of anything they don't know, and they won't take care of anything they don't really love.

And so, what we really encourage people to think about is the fact that the true outer museum is their own backyard.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: To stream episodes of Outdoors Maryland , visit mpt.org and don't forget to follow us on social media.

(owl hoots) Learn more about Maryland's diverse natural resources @dnr.maryland.gov, or download the official mobile app.

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