Endangered beetles at center of struggle between property owners, environment

As a professional building contractor, William Carmichael thought he'd accounted for everything necessary to guard against erosion when he began constructing his own home in 1991 atop a steep 100-foot cliff with a spectacular view of the Chesapeake Bay.

After studying the average annual erosion rate for the site, he calculated he needed to place the house 60 feet from the edge to ensure it wouldn't eventually tumble into the water.

The key was to build a stone wall on the sandy beach to stabilize the slope, and Carmichael assumed that wouldn't be a problem. In fact, he said Calvert County, in granting him the permit, urged him in writing to "armor" the slope with just such a barrier.

It didn't turn out as planned. Since at least 1996, authorities have barred Carmichael and about 90 other nearby homeowners from building structures or taking other steps to stop the erosion, all to protect the habitat of the endangered puritan tiger beetle. The species can live only in locales featuring both eroding, bare cliff faces (where eggs are laid) and sandy beaches (where adults mate).

Now the cliff's edge has crept to just 20 feet from Carmichael's house. In November, a landslide bit off a swath 12 feet deep and 40 feet wide, plunging his hot tub over the precipice.

"It's no longer just slowly going down. Now it's going in chunks," Carmichael said. "Within a year or two, you'll be back taking pictures of a house down there."

The predicament is a stark example of the ongoing struggle between property owners' rights and environmental protection. Both sides can point to laws that back their position. There's no obvious compromise unless someone can find a way to increase the puritan tiger beetle population sufficiently on state-owned cliffs where nobody objects to erosion and the species can be protected.

Although I typically side with environmentalists, my sympathies in this case are with the homeowners. Many of them built or bought the houses at Chesapeake Ranch Estates in Lusby knowing about the risk of erosion -- the high, crumbling cliffs make it impossible to miss -- but unaware that they couldn't take effective measures to halt it.

"When I bought, I knew I'd have to do erosion controls. What I didn't know was what the obstacles to erosion controls would be," Tony Vajda said.

Since Vajda bought his house in 1996, the lawn overlooking the bay has shrunk from 100 feet to 60 feet. The spacious houses on his stretch of the cliff-top currently are valued at $500,000 to $750,000, he said. With effective erosion controls, they'd probably go for more than $1 million.

Part of the problem was timing. Development along the Calvert shoreline accelerated in the early 1990s, immediately after the beetle was formally declared threatened in 1990 under the federal Endangered Species Act. In 1993, after Carmichael had moved in, a key report for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service warned that, until experiments prove otherwise, "all existing shore erosion control structures must be viewed as incompatible with long-term Puritan tiger beetle survival."

Even then, federal, state and local authorities held out hope that a way could be found to contain the erosion without contributing to the beetles' extinction. "It may be possible to engineer a structure or other method of erosion control that would decrease but not wholly eliminate erosion of the cliff face," the 1993 report said.

Carmichael, Vajda and others spent tens of thousands of dollars installing large concrete balls just offshore designed to curb wave damage, but they haven't worked.

Then there's the question of why it's more important to protect beetles than people's homes. The puritan tiger beetle is of no economic value, but scientists say it's important to preserve any species, for the sake of biological diversity that enriches the ecosystem. There are only a few thousand left, mostly around the Chesapeake Bay.

"We often compare particular species to popped rivets in an airplane. How many can you lose before the whole system crashes?" said Glenn Therres, a Department of Natural Resources biologist who supervises Maryland's endangered species program.

Therres said authorities have little "wiggle room" in enforcing the federal and state endangered species laws, when there's a risk that a species will disappear.

What's maddening for the homeowners, though, is that those laws repeatedly override other legislation guaranteeing their right to protect their property.

A Maryland law says the owner of land bounding on navigable water is entitled to "make improvements into the water in front of the land to protect the shore of that person against erosion." Other state measures are designed to encourage vegetation to grow on cliffs to prevent erosion and filter water draining into the bay.

For some homeowners, the lesson is to do your homework before you buy. Lidia Cucurull paid $405,000 in 2008 for a three-bedroom, two-bath house with a deck.

"We knew there was erosion, but we didn't know it was that bad," she said. She lost about 10 feet in a Christmas landslide, and the deck is just eight feet from the edge at its closest point.

"Now looking back, I wouldn't have bought it. I used to go out on the deck, and now I don't like it," Cucurull said. "It's scary."