Gazing out at the sea of marsh grasses on Hart-Miller Island, Joe Corcoran had his eyes peeled.

Corcoran, a longtime birder and president of the Baltimore Bird Club, was looking for a king rail, a threatened species difficult to find in Maryland.

Using his iPhone, Corcoran played the bird’s call aloud, hoping to draw out any rails that could be hiding amid the waving reeds.

Then, he heard it: A sharp “kek, kek, kek.” The sound of a king rail.

For Corcoran, it was a highlight of October’s birding trip to Hart-Miller, a once-eroded island chain offshore of Baltimore County that was brought back to life by sediment dredged from the Chesapeake Bay.

In all, birders on the October tour spotted (or overheard) 78 different bird species: royal terns, buffleheads, trumpeter swans, American golden plovers. About 300 different species have been observed on the island, according to an online database called eBird.

Though it’s now a popular tourist attraction, the restoration of the island didn’t come without controversy. Residents pushed their fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, though they were unsuccessful.

Since the placement of dredge material ended on Hart-Miller in 2009 due to state legislation, birding tours have become increasingly popular. Officials from the Maryland Environmental Service, which maintains the island’s dredge facility, say they have conducted tours for hundreds of people over the past few years.

So environmentalists — and bird lovers in particular — had lots to say after word came down, shortly after the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in March, that Hart-Miller was a possible destination for material dredged from the Patapsco River to create a new berth for massive ships, which would have been reachable even with the bridge site blocked by debris.

In part because of residents’ vocal pushback, Tradepoint abandoned its plan for Hart-Miller. Instead, it will store about 4.2 million cubic yards of contaminated sediment elsewhere, including at an ocean storage facility, and at other dredge storage areas locally. Unanticipated speed bumps that would have slowed the placement of dredge at Hart-Miller also played a role.

The Bird Club, for its part, was concerned that Tradepoint’s plan would have dumped dredge material on key habitat in the north cell of the island, a popular congregating area for birds, with no plans in place to preserve sections of habitat.

“The entire wildlife habitat in the north cell will be decimated by becoming covered in dredge slurry during the process,” read a letter from the Bird Club regarding Tradepoint’s plans. “This is unacceptable!”

But the club was open to a plan that would have saved certain areas in the north cell for continued use by birds, Corcoran said. They were hoping for a 100-acre tract to be undisturbed by new sediment.

‘Forgotten grandchild’

Currently, the island’s future is up in the air.

Had Tradepoint moved forward with the plan, the company had pledged $40 million in community benefit funding, to be split between Hart-Miller Island and waterfront residential communities in Baltimore County.

The wish list is long for a beloved island still developing as a wildlife hub and tourist attraction in the decade since dredge placement came to a close, said Paul Brylske, president of the Friends of Hart-Miller Island.

Through the free birding tours, offered about twice per month during warmer months and once a month after fall begins, participants are able to board a boat operated by the Maryland Environmental Service, and use a designated dock. But otherwise, visitors must beach or anchor their boats in order to access Hart-Miller, since there are no public docks at the island.

During the tours, led by MES, participants make their way to the island’s north cell. Normally, this area isn’t open to the public, because it must undergo continued maintenance, Brylske said.

It was the north cell that continued receiving dredge material through 2009. The south cell, which stopped receiving sediment in 1990, is now partly a state park, complete with a snowball stand, bike rental area and restrooms.

“The citizens are paying for it, and they can’t have access to it,” Brylske said. “We want to have people who aren’t ardent birders to be able to have access.”

During the tour, participants view mudflats along the rim of the massive ponds in the north cell, where a host of gulls, plovers and cormorants hang out. But it is the wetlands in the interior of the north cell would be lost to Tradepoint’s plan, Corcoran said, which often host rails, gallinules, marsh wrens and ducks, Corcoran said.

The free tours are open to the general public, but to make the cut, registrants must win a lottery on the Maryland Port Administration website.

Brylske was hopeful that Tradepoint’s dredge material — and its payment — could transform the north cell into an accessible state park one day, perhaps with viewing platforms for birders and other amenities. But now, another source will have to fill that void.

“One of the good things that came out of this whole process with Tradepoint is the awareness of folks, especially at the state level, that we have to do something with the north cell,” Brylske said. “We’ve been like this step-forgotten-grandchild.”

Tradepoint’s plan attracted concern from a contingent of residents who expressed concerns about the dredge material that would be bound for the island, laced with fingerprints of Sparrows Point’s industrial past as Bethlehem Steel.

Testing commissioned by Tradepoint to determine which sediments met environmental criteria for ocean placement uncovered elevated levels of metals, semi-volatile organic compounds, PCBs (or polychlorinated biphenyls) and PAHs (or polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons).

To be placed at a dredge site such as the one at Hart-Miller, certain criteria has to be met, Brylske said. But as word spread that “toxic waste” was bound for the island, some residents balked, Brylske said.

“There’s been that type of dredge material out there for 35 years and nothing has happened,” Brylske said. “All that stuff they worry about dumping in there is already in there.”

A natural escape

For the time being, some treasure the island’s current state, its natural beauty, and perhaps even its exclusivity.

For wildlife, the island is a little-developed oasis situated near the mouth of the Back River. And birds aren’t the only animals to reach it. Hart-Miller has a resident turkey, white-tailed deer and a single squirrel that seemingly hitchhiked onto the island by boat. The rest of the motley crew likely traveled by swimming, said Matías Orrego, an environmental specialist at MES.

On a sunny October day, Ela Carpenter from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was visiting the island to place tiny stickers on the wings of monarchs, so that when the migrating orange and black butterflies arrive in Mexico for the winter, researchers there will be able to track them back to the island.

“They have an interesting life cycle, where there’s four generations that it takes them to go from Mexico to the north back to Mexico,” said Carpenter, who was tagging the butterflies for a program called Monarch Watch.

“Excuse me, but this is a birding trip,” chirped Corcoran, as Carpenter reached her hand through a butterfly net to grasp the flitting female monarch.

For Lt. Col. Earl “Rock” Williams, of Essex, the birding tour had a unique meaning.

It was the first time he was returning to the island after surviving a helicopter crash onto its banks in 2014 due to a mechanical failure — and his first time actually touring the island on foot.

But being at Hart-Miller wasn’t emotional for Williams. It was only natural that he attend, and take the opportunity to watch his favorite species, including herons and woodpeckers, he said.

“It’s just like anything,” he said. “Something happens, and you don’t stop doing things.”

Have a news tip? Contact Christine Condon at chcondon@baltsun.com, 667-256-6883 and @CChristine19 on X.