Maryland's ever-growing deer population is munching through suburban shrubs. Black bears, once hunted nearly to extinction, climb onto rural front porches. And wild turkeys soon will have set up residence in every county in Maryland.
As quickly as those game creatures are coming back, deep within Maryland's forests a host of songbirds and plants are disappearing. Biologists say both trends are at least partly linked to the shrinking of East Coast forests.
Large blocks of Maryland's woods now look like checkerboards, broken by development in the suburbs and logging in Western Maryland.
Wildlife that prefer open spaces -- such as deer, bears and turkeys -- have prospered. But lesser-known inhabitants fare poorly.
Take the worm-eating warbler. The average suburbanite may not know this little brown bird that pokes around in dead leaves, but it's as common in deep forests as cardinals are at backyard feeders. It spends most of the year in Central and South America, but every spring it comes north to breed in East Coast forests.
For two decades, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Patuxent Wildlife Research Center near Bowie has tracked the populations of warblers, wood thrush, red-eyed vireo and dozens of other songbirds as they migrated from the tropics. The scientists found that 75 percent of these species had declined, almost half of them significantly, in the past decade.
Wildlife biologists thought they might find that the songbirds were being harmed by the cutting of tropical rain forests.
But they found instead that some songbirds are more threatened by the cuts made in forests in the Eastern United States where they breed. While the condition of the rain forests is important, the birds seem able to adapt more easily to the disturbance there, said James F. Lynch, a research ecologist with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater.
"We do have some effect on the fate of these birds by how we manage our forests in the Eastern United States," he said.
Native plant species are having trouble as well. Like General Motors competing with Toyota, the state's native plants are being crowded out by feisty foreign imports that seem perfectly suited for the disturbed forests now so common in the state.
As trees are cut down in the large forests of Western Maryland, sunlight pierces through to the forest floor, allowing different plants to invade the forest edges.
"When you open up the forest canopy, it promotes the growth of more aggressive, pollution-resistant species like garlic mustard," which grows over and kills native species, said Rodney L. Bartgis, biologist for the Natural Heritage program of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.
If the trend continues, he said, Maryland will have few places that contain only the plants that grew here a couple of hundred years ago.
In Patapsco Valley State Park, a narrow forest on the edge of Baltimore and Howard counties, the native plant species have been wiped out, he said.
Sometimes, the immigrants aren't plants but birds. The brown-headed cowbird, for instance, elbows its way into the nests of native birds to lay its eggs. Their young are so plucky they push out the other chicks and make their adoptive parents raise them.
Maryland has lost 203 plant and wildlife species, and another 413 are endangered or threatened.
These trends worry environmentalists and some state natural resource officials who believe the answer lies in maintaining the large blocks of forest that are left.
"You have to decide that there are woods out there that are not going to be allowed to be fragmented," Mr. Bartgis said.
But that is not easy. Suburban sprawl is chewing up vast acres of trees. Between 1985 and 1990, Maryland lost 71,000 acres of trees, primarily to development. And in Western Maryland, where a half-million acres of private and public forest still dominate the landscape, timbering is a major industry.
State officials say they must manage the forests for the sometimes competing interests of timbering, wildlife and recreation.
But environmentalists argue that more land should be excluded from timbering for the enjoyment of people and to protect both plant and wildlife species that will only survive in the so-called old growth woods.
Only about 1,000 acres in Maryland have never been cut, said Daniel Boone, a forest ecologist for the Wilderness Society, as he stood in Belt Woods, an old-growth forest near Bowie. There, trees first sprouted about the time Lord Calvert took out his ax on Indian land.
Belt Woods is now only a postage stamp of a forest, slightly more than 500 acres surrounded by development, but it is vastly different from the average woods. Above Mr. Boone's head is a canopy of oaks and tulip poplars of all ages and sizes, from 5 feet to 150 feet. Among their branches is the highest density of forest-nesting birds in the United States, he said.
Below his feet is a variety of life more diverse than all that is aboveground. The soil is springy and soft, like walking on a bed of feathers that has built up over hundreds of years. There are no stumps, only overturned trees whose roots have pulled up earth -- nature's way of slowly turning over nutrients buried in the forest floor.
Small communities of Christmas fern, which Mr. Boone said only appear in old forests, are scattered through Belt Woods.
It is these special areas of the state that Mr. Boone, who recently left the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, would like to see saved as much for the protection of species as to allow people to view them. Even people who know nothing about forests immediately feel the difference when they walk into an old-growth forest, he said.
Continuing debate between environmentalists and loggers now rages over how much private and public land should be allowed to be cut. Loggers say if the state places further restrictions on logging on private lands, the more likely it is that landowners will sell out to developers.
And state officials say there are good reasons for allowing cuts on public land. Sales of timber pull in about $800,000 to state coffers every year, said Eric Schwaab, chief of resources management at the DNR's Forest and Parks Service. The Department of Economic and Employment Development estimates that cutting in Savage River State Forest, one of the state's largest, provides $700,000 to the state's economy each year.
Some of the wildlife that people care most about -- deer, turkeys and black bears -- benefit from the forest cutting, Mr. Schwaab said. While those animals also prospered because of hunting restrictions, the change of habitat due to timbering has had an effect.
Traditionally, the state has focused its efforts on protecting and encouraging those species. Each year the DNR directs about $3 million to $4 million in revenue from licenses to protecting game species, but far less is spent on endangered species or songbirds like the wood thrush.
That has begun to change with the so-called chickadee checkoff, which has raised $3 million in the past three years as Marylanders checked a box on their state income tax return giving money to endangered plant and wildlife species.
One naturalist is confident that the public will begin to care more about the forests as people search for a respite from city life. There will be almost no other place Marylanders will be able to go that won't be paved over, said Frances Hunt, a forest specialist for the National Wildlife Federation.