A perfect winter walk
Swarming with geese instead of bugs, Wye Island is best visited during cold weather months
There are some places that are even better to visit in the frigid months than when it’s warm out. Wye Island is one of those. This time of year, it’s swarming with geese and swans and other migrating waterfowl. The paths that are pretty soggy in the spring are now frozen and easier to walk. And there are no ticks or other bugs. But the best thing about any winter walk is that most other people stay home.
Millie and I went there for a stroll one chilly afternoon this past week and nearly had the whole island all to ourselves. Wye Island is nestled between Queen Anne’s County and Talbot County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. It’s about an hour’s drive from our home in Annapolis. Millie, of course, is the year-old rescue retriever, sort of Labrador-ish, but peculiar with her short, floppy ears, a white blaze on her chest, and inquisitive hazel eyes.
Curiously, we met a Millie clone when we took a detour looking for a place to have a bite of lunch and somehow wound up in the town of Denton. We strolled around the stately Caroline County Courthouse and there on the corner was a lady with a mini-Millie in tow. The lady had her poor puppy’s torso covered with a frightful Christmas sweater, and despite being burdened by what any other animal with any sense of dignity would find humiliating, the pup wiggled with unselfconscious delight as Millie gave her a once-over with her nose. The pup had all of Millie’s markings, right down to the white spot on one paw. She and Millie must be some sort of a sub-breed or perhaps a mix, but with what, I’d like to know.
One time while walking through Quiet Waters Park, we met a young woman with a dog that looked like Toulouse-Lautrec’s Labrador, with stubby legs, smooth black fur and ears that drooped down to the pavement. It turned out to be a cross between a lab and a basset hound. “What do you call it?” I asked, stooping down to pat an ear. “It’s a ‘Blab,’ ” she said. Of course. At least that’s a better name than Labradoodle.
How Wye Island got its name is debatable, according to Hammill Kenny, author of my favorite book, “The Place Names of Maryland, Their Origin and Meaning,” published by the Maryland Historical Society in 1984. Wye Island is surrounded by the two branches of the Wye River and connected to the Delmarva Peninsula by a low wooden bridge. Kenny quotes the local postman from the last century, a Mr. Fowler, who believed that the river got its name from its “Y” shape where it meets Eastern Bay. Kenny also notes that a Rev. William Wye lived nearby in 1744. But he places his bets on one of the early landowners, Philemon Lloyd, whom he supposes named the river after the one that joins the Severn, forming the boundary between England and Wales. The Lloyds, of course, were of Welsh extraction.
I can’t resist stopping to read historical markers, and there are plenty on the road to the island. You can learn a lot when you let them spark your curiosity. Here’s what I dug up when I got home:
Philemon was the son of Edward Lloyd I, one of the Puritans who established the settlement of Providence in 1649 near what would become Annapolis. Philemon patented Wye Island and much of the surrounding land in 1682. When his descendant, Edward Lloyd IV owned the plantation, he also owned hundreds of enslaved laborers who produced tobacco, corn and wheat on his 4,200 acres. Frederick Douglass was one of those enslaved people for a couple of years when he was just a little boy. Douglass later wrote about the horrendous conditions he experienced there in one of his autobiographies.
When Lloyd IV was elected to the Maryland General Assembly in 1771, he figured he needed a place to live in Annapolis during the legislative session, so he purchased a half-built, three-story brick Georgian mansion on Maryland Avenue as his “town house.” He bought
the home from Samuel Chase. It’s now known as the Chase-Lloyd House.
Lloyd’s friend William Paca also lived near Wye Island. His ancestral home, now serving as a conference center for the Aspen Institute, has its own historical marker on the roadside. Paca, of course, is one of Maryland’s four signers of the Declaration of Independence and served as the state’s third governor. Like Lloyd, Paca enslaved laborers both at his Wye plantation and at his town house, which he built on Prince George Street in Annapolis in the 1770s. The Paca House and Gardens, now a museum operated by Historic Annapolis, was the birthplace of the city’s preservation movement. It was recognized as a National Historic Landmark in 1971.
Driving across the little bridge to the island, Millie stuck her nose out the window to sniff at a squadron of tundra swans whistling overhead. There’s usually a raft of Canada geese, swans and diving ducks in the lee of the bridge, and we weren’t disappointed this time. The long road to the far end of the island is lined with trees bordering the stubbly corn fields. Blue birds darted about, flashing their color at us.
Most of this 2,880-acre island is overseen by the Maryland Park Service as a Natural Resources Management Area to provide habitat for wintering waterfowl and other native wildlife, including deer, bald eagles and wading birds. You can roam the miles of country roads by car or bike. There are now 12 miles of nature trails, including some fairly recently blazed. On one of those trails, you’ll find a majestic American holly tree that’s nearly 300 years old.
All of the geese seemed to be heading toward the southern end of the island, so that’s where we headed, too, following the road past the pavement’s end and driving down the dirt lane. We wound up at the Ferry Point Trail, one of my favorite sites on the island. The trail is straight and flat, the path frozen hard. It leads through a tunnel formed by the overarching branches of ancient, gnarled
Osage orange trees. The effect is quite middle-earthy.
Millie poked her nose at the fallen fruit, some of which were torn open by birds and squirrels to get at the seeds, the ones still intact looking like neon green tennis balls suffering from goiter. She did not try to fetch any of them, which is remarkable considering their likeness to her favorite obsession. We followed the trail to the river’s edge, where the low tide allowed us to roam up and down the shore. Millies’ paw prints in the sand were dwarfed by those of a great blue heron.
There were thousands of geese and swans flying overhead, but by the cacophony of their collective calls, they all seemed to be gathering in the late afternoon on the far side of a windbreak of tall loblolly pines. I recorded the sound to savor later — a true Chesapeake symphony.
I should caution here that hunting is allowed on Wye Island, as it is in many other places where you might enjoy winter hiking. Check websites for scheduled deer hunts and to be safe, it’s wise to wear a fluorescent vest or hat when you’re roaming through the woods.
And you know the adage about “Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints?” Well, particularly this time of year, natural surface trails can get muddy, and when they do, it’s polite to not walk or ride your bike on them. Your footprints and wheel ruts churn up the mud so that when the trail freezes over or dries up, it leaves an ankle-wrenching mess for other folks. There are plenty of hard-surface trails to use when the landscape is damp.
The wonderful story about Wye Island is that it was saved from development in the early 1970s, when James Rouse, the developer of Columbia, Maryland and the Baltimore Inner Harbor wanted to build thousands of housing units on the site. Fortunately, the leadership of Queen Anne’s County and the State of Maryland saw another future for the island. The result is this magnificent expanse of forest, field and marsh that’s preserved forever for all of us to enjoy.
And sorry about the Labradoodle crack. Send pictures of your cute pooch to me at arundelhappytrails@gmail.com.
Wye Island Natural Resources Management Area
632 Wye Island Road Queenstown, MD 21658 No admission, open dawn to dusk. There’s plenty of parking at the various trailheads. A trusty Eagle Scout has built a comfortable enclosed latrine at the far end of the Ferry Point Trail, but that’s about the only convenience available.