NORTH BEACH, Md. — In the softly lit hours of dawn, a small group of dedicated volunteers head to North Beach on a rescue mission. They’ll spend the next four to six hours searching for horseshoe crabs stuck under the boardwalk and in the rock walls at the popular bayfront beach.
North Beach is a well-known swimming spot in the region — but long before humans ever took up residence, the sandy beaches served as a breeding and egg-laying ground for horseshoe crabs. The horseshoes face a precarious situation today. When they come close to shore to lay their eggs, they risk getting trapped in the rocks or under the boardwalk. If trapped, they’ll die within a few days.
Kathy Foutz, a retired teacher and outdoor educator, goes to the beach every morning at low tide with whatever volunteers show up. They toil for hours in the sun to save every crab they can find. It’s often dangerous and always physically demanding. Horseshoes are fragile, and it can take hours or days to successfully pull one from a tight spot. Volunteers load them into a wagon and walk them down to a good release point, where they hope they won’t get stuck again.
It’s truly a race against time for both horseshoes and humans. Once high tide comes, the volunteers have to pack up and go home. It’s far too dangerous to be out on the rocks in high tide, so they save who they can, and pray that anyone they couldn’t rescue will make it until morning. According to Foutz’s personal count, they saved 2,300 horseshoes last year, and 895 the year before.
This is only her third year leading horseshoe rescue ops. There’s a long line of folks doing this work in North Beach, including “Boardwalk Bob,” who has guided Foutz these last few years. Horseshoe crab rescue takes place all along the East Coast during spawning season, which is from mid-May to early June.
“It’s a miracle. People just pull together. I’ve met the nicest people in the world doing horseshoe crab rescue,” Foutz said. She added that people often join in from the boardwalk or beach once they see what the group is up to.
“It brings joy,” she said. “You’re doing something in nature, you’re doing something that matters.”
The horseshoes have been migrating here to lay their eggs for millions of years. For context, the first tribes appeared in Maryland around 10,000 years ago, the town of North Beach was founded in 1910, and the boardwalk as we know it was completed in 1998. One might say the horseshoes have seniority.
Horseshoe crabs are a keystone species of the bay. Migratory birds eat their eggs, for example. Despite surviving 13 major extinction events and being 445 million years old, the horseshoe crab population is growing more vulnerable because of manmade obstacles, overfishing, and their value in vaccine research.
In theory, vulnerabilities could be countered by the horseshoes’ high egg-laying numbers — each female can lay 80,000 to 100,000 eggs annually. However, out of every 10,000 eggs, only six will hatch.
Foutz wants people to know that horseshoes aren’t dangerous. Their tails are not stingers, as many people assume. Horseshoes are gentle, living fossils, whose millions of years of instinct tell them to go to this beach.
She hopes for some longer-term conservation solutions, but in the meantime, she’ll be down at the beach until the spawning season is over. Anyone can join in and the group will provide appropriate training for those who come down — no notice is required.
Safety is the most important thing for both humans and horseshoes, so volunteers need to wear gloves, and no kids will be allowed on the rocks. There’s no formal rank structure or procedures, just a group of dedicated people choosing to share our world with fellow creatures.
“You can’t save them all,” Foutz says. “You know you made a difference for that one. It matters for the ones we do get to save in our little corner of the world.”
For more information about horseshoe crab rescue, see the group’s Facebook page.
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