Chesapeake Bay

A perfect marriage between habitat conservation around Delaware's Chesapeake Bay, cooperation between farmers and conservationists, David Sparks sportsman spotlight.

If you take one hundred thousand acres of forest and turn it into one hundred thousand acres of ag, you're going to end up with more sediment and more nutrients coming into the bay. It's easier for a farmer in Maryland to understand his impact on the bay because on the weekend he gets in his boat and goes out on the bay and catches crab, communicating that there's a need way up there to improve the bay down here is a challenging thing, because if everyone understands that, then we'll be that much closer to achieving our goals here, particularly on the Delmarva Peninsula.

The landscape here is predominantly in private ownership. I don't know the exact numbers off the top of my head, but I would put an estimate at 90 percent of the peninsulas in private ownership. And so if the mission is to have a real impact on habitat conservation on Delmarva Peninsula, there's no way around it. We have to work with private landowners on the conservation side.

I've bought into the idea that Ducks Unlimited and of habitat for waterfowl forever. And as a landowner, I think we have a responsibility to make the property better than we left it around the Chesapeake Bay. Land is precious. You have a combination of federal land, state land and the private landowners. It seems that all three have to work in combination to give waterfowl space.

That was a Ducks Unlimited presentation.