Wildlife rescued from Baltimore harbor as officials work to clean oil spill

Hannah Epstein, The Baltimore Sun on Jun 5, 2025

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BALTIMORE — As efforts to clean thousands of gallons of oil from waters near Baltimore’s Harbor East continue, officials are working to rescue turtles and other wildlife from the affected areas. Officials say that the leak originated from diesel tanks that supplied fuel to the Johns Hopkins Hospital care facilities.

A.J. Metcalf, a spokesperson for Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources, said it had been an “all hands on deck effort,” with officials from various state departments coming together to help identify and remove the impacted animals. Around two dozen geese and ducks had been rescued from the area, along with three turtles — two slider turtles and a snapping turtle — as of Thursday afternoon.

The affected animals are being transferred to Tri-State Bird Rescue & Research, a wildlife rescue service in Newark, Delaware, where they will be rehabilitated before being released back into the wild. There had not been any reports of animals dying as a result of the oil spill as of Thursday afternoon.

Efforts to encourage safe habitats for wildlife near the harbor have been ongoing for decades, and in 2022, a collaboration led by the Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore introduced a new 100-square-foot basking location for local turtles, according to the National Aquarium. The project, which was supported by the National Aquarium, Clearwater Mills and the Living Classrooms Foundation, was dubbed “Turtle Island.”

Turtle Island is located in a canal that runs along Lancaster Street, between Eden and South Caroline streets, close to the site of the oil spill.

“It is a turtle haven,” Adam Lindquist, vice president of the Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore, said of the canal. “This canal is just filled with hundreds of turtles.”

“Thankfully, the turtles are resilient to this sort of pollution, but obviously any turtles that are obviously in distress are being picked up,” Lindquist said.

James Piper Bond, president and CEO of the Living Classrooms Foundation, told The Baltimore Sun that, luckily, “the turtles are doing pretty well, the DNR experts have been able to catch some of them … they are not overly damaged at this point, from our understanding.”

Bond noted that there had been a “concerted effort over the last four decades to bring wildlife, aquatic life, back into the harbor, especially … where the Lancaster street canal is.”

“We want to make sure the turtles survive, and the aquatic life survives, and the bird life. We’ve all been working hard to encourage that,” Bond noted.

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