Spring Gardens Facility

About the Program
The Baltimore Gas and Electric company's Spring Garden campus is a 72-acre facility that provides natural gas and underground electric operations to the surrounding community. This facility is located in the heart of Maryland just south of Baltimore, across from Ridgley's Cove and nearly surrounded by the Middle Branch of the Patapsco. A 100-foot forested buffer spanning nine acres separates this site from the surrounding waterbodies, performing as an important buffer from trash that ends up in this river. This site not only serves as an important gas and electric supply, but it also makes up the most of the available habitat on-site with monitoring efforts focused on osprey, songbirds, bats, foxes, groundhogs and two endangered plant species.

Practices and Impacts

• The osprey platform on-site has been in place since 2008 and has finally shown some evidence of use in the past two years. With a breeding pair found successfully nesting in 2021, a live camera will be installed prior to next breeding season to get up close snapshots of the success of this platform. 
• Three cavity songbird nesting boxes were installed throughout the Spring Gardens campus in 2020 with the hopes of attracting the native eastern bluebird, tree swallows, black capped chickadees and house wrens. There was evidence of nest building in all of these boxes in the last two years, but no eggs were laid. There are plans to move these two boxes next year to a more attractive location for these songbirds. 
• There are two bat boxes on-site and an abandoned valve house that provide roosting opportunities for the native little brown bat and hoary bat. These boxes were not used in the past two years; however, acoustic monitoring showed that hoary bats are in the area. There are plans to re-install the bat boxes in 2022 as the poles supporting these boxes aren't in great condition. 
• The abandoned groundhog burrows on-site were monitored the past two years as red foxes were found denning in them the year prior. Two trail cameras were set out near the entrances to these dens, and hundreds of photos were taken not only of red foxes, but also raccoons and groundhogs.
• A plot of land next to the butterfly garden on the campus was seeded with the endangered showy goldenrod in 2020 and 2021. No plants sprouted in the area that was seeded, but five plants were found just to the south in 2021. 
• In a patch of land adjacent to the Heath Street Canal, white turtle head seeds were spread in 2020 and 2021 in the hopes of establishing a stand of this species on-site to attract the endangered Baltimore checkerspot. Unfortunately none of these plants took, so additional spots in the emergent wetlands on site will be evaluated for future plantings.