Not that long ago, the Chesapeake Bay was home to hundreds of scattered islands. Migratory birds nested in them, and blue crabs hid in their marshes. Some served as waypoints for Algonquin-speaking tribes and, later, homes for settlers and watermen.
Over the last two hundred years, though, erosion accelerated by storms and rising seas has drowned many of these islands. Now, federal engineers are hard at work rebuilding a glimmer of those lost lands.
For close to three decades the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has worked to restore one eroded land mass, Poplar Island, off the Eastern Shore. And this summer, an Army Corps team launched work to reconstruct two more islands farther south in the bay…