Main Features and History

Cypress Creek enters the Magothy just upriver from Henderson Point. It has two branches, northern and southern. The northern branch drains most of Park Plaza and the Giant shopping center, making it the most “urban” stream in the watershed, with the highest proportion of impervious surface. The southern branch drains the commercial areas along Ritchie Highway near the bowling alley and car wash, but its
watershed includes land west of the commercial strip, where there is a fairly undisturbed non-tidal wetland (GET INFO FROM SIPPLE BOOK). The tidal portions of the two branches each have one bend, but otherwise are fairly straight. The tidal portions of both branches may be dredged in the winter of 2000/2001. Cypress Marine, a public marina and boat yard, is on the south shore of the creek near its mouth. (RAMP?) It is reached from Ritchie Highway via Jones Station Road, left on Manhattan Road, which becomes Stinchcomb Road and ends near the marina.

Living Resources

There is very little SAV in the tidal portion. There are very sparse beds of horned pondweed in the upper tidal reaches in the spring. Smuggler’s Cove, near the mouth of the creek on its north side, had several other species of SAV in its shallows in 1999: Eurasian watermilfoil, Redhead grass, and Common waterweed. This cove is the farthest upriver any of these three species has been found in recent surveys. (See SAV map on the VIMS web site at http://www.vims.edu/bio/sav/sav99/quads/rb023.html)
The exotic and invasive mammal nutria has also been seen in this area; it resembles a muskrat but is larger, about the size of a beaver, and has a long, round tail. The muskrat’s tail is flat on the sides.

Non-Tidal

The north branch crosses Ritchie Highway at McKinsey Road, but is in a culvert for most of this portion. The creek is visible behind the Shell station (where there is also a sewage pumping station) and along the north side of McKinsey Road near the Annapolis Bank & Trust office, where it is in a concrete channel. The south branch crosses Ritchie Highway in two places, just north and south of Cypress Cove Road (ADC map book map 15, map reference D16). The northern of these two crossings forms a small wetland on the west side of Ritchie Highway.