Maryland is famous ground for nutria. The Chesapeake Bay marshes, especially around Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge in Dorchester County, hosted one of the worst nutria invasions in the country, and a federal and state eradication campaign spent two decades pushing the animals back. Thirteen of the state’s 15 records come from Dorchester County, and 11 of those sit inside Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park, which shares that same marsh landscape.
Fifteen records is a small number for a species that once numbered in the thousands here, and that’s the lesson. Public occurrence reports never tracked the real scale of the invasion or the removal effort; they show where observers happened to file sightings. Reports peak in January with a smaller rise in March, which fits winter marsh work, when the vegetation is down and animals are easier to spot, more than any seasonal shift in the animals themselves.
Globally the IUCN lists the nutria as Least Concern, but in Maryland it carries no conservation status at all. Here it’s treated strictly as an invasive species to be removed, and the sparse record says nothing about how many remain.
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