Maryland Nature Guide: February 2026
February is late winter in Maryland — the Chesapeake's waterfowl spectacle holds while the first signs of spring stir, as Bald Eagles refurbish nests, skunk cabbage pushes through the mud, and red maples redden the swamps. The western mountains stay locked in cold as the Eastern Shore softens.
What to look for this week
- The Chesapeake waterfowl winter peaks — Tundra Swans, geese, and rafts of canvasback and redhead crowd Blackwater NWR as the Christmas Bird Counts wrap up across Maryland.
- The Quadrantid meteor shower peaks in a short, sharp burst around January 3 — watch after midnight from a dark site like Assateague Island or the Garrett County highlands.
- A planning week for Maryland gardeners — review last season and order seeds early before the popular varieties sell out, while the ground sits frozen.
Birds This Month
February is a turning month for Maryland's birds. The Chesapeake waterfowl spectacle still holds — Tundra Swans, canvasback, redhead, and rafts of diving ducks crowd the open Bay and the Blackwater impoundments — but change is underway. Maryland's resident Bald Eagles are now on eggs, the earliest nesters of the year, refurbishing the great stick nests around Blackwater, the Patuxent, and the upper Bay. Great horned owls are likewise incubating in the cold woods.
Listen for the first songs of spring: male northern cardinals and Carolina wrens whistle on mild mornings, red-winged blackbirds return to the cattail marshes and start their konk-la-ree, and tundra swans grow restless before their northward departure. Feeders still draw juncos, white-throated sparrows, goldfinches (molting toward yellow), and house finches. Late in the month the first American woodcock begin their twilight sky-dance over damp Piedmont fields and thickets — one of the great early signs of the Maryland spring.
What's Blooming
February brings Maryland's first true flowers in the mildest spots. The mottled hoods of skunk cabbage are well up now in wet woods, swamps, and seeps, generating their own heat to bloom through the frozen mud — the earliest native wildflower of the year. In sheltered Piedmont and Eastern Shore gardens, snowdrops, winter aconite, and the fragrant ribbon-flowers of witch hazel and winter jasmine open during thaws, and the first crocus push up under south-facing walls.
In the swamp forests and along stream edges statewide, the tiny red flowers of red maple begin to open before the leaves, casting a rosy haze over the wetlands that is one of the surest signs the season is turning. Silver maple and the catkins of alder and hazelnut follow along the watercourses. The winter rosettes of next spring's ephemerals — spring beauty, cutleaf toothwort, and trout lily — are visible on the rich Piedmont forest floor, waiting for the warmth of March.
Garden This Month
February is when Maryland gardening slowly reawakens. In the central Piedmont and on the Eastern Shore, the first outdoor jobs arrive on the mild days between cold snaps. This is the prime window to prune dormant fruit trees, grapes, and summer-flowering shrubs while they are still leafless and the structure is easy to read; cut on dry days to limit disease, and remove crossing and damaged wood.
Indoors, the seed-starting season begins in earnest. Start onions, leeks, celery, and the first peppers and slow herbs under grow lights for spring transplanting. Toward month's end in the warmer zones, the soil dries enough to direct-sow the first cold-hardy crops — peas, spinach, radishes, and lettuce — under cover or row fabric. Top-dress fall-planted garlic with compost as it begins to stir, cut back ornamental grasses and last year's perennial stems before new growth emerges, and turn the compost pile as it thaws.
Zone 7a (central Piedmont & the Baltimore–Washington corridor): late winter, with the first window for action. Prune dormant apples, pears, and grapes on mild dry days, start onions and leeks indoors under lights, and uncover cold frames on sunny afternoons to vent the hardy greens.
Zone 7b (lower Eastern Shore & the Bay's warming edge): spring is near. Direct-sow the first peas, spinach, and radishes into workable soil late in the month, top-dress fall-planted garlic with compost, and prune fruit trees before the buds swell.
Zone 8a (the mildest tidewater pockets of the lower Shore): the earliest gardens in Maryland. Peas, spinach, lettuce, and radishes can go in by mid- to late month, cold frames are productive, and pansies and early greens transplant out on warm days.
What's at the Farmers Market
February markets in Maryland still run on winter stores, but the first fresh signs appear. Storage apples from Frederick and western Maryland orchards remain crisp, joined by the last of the cellar's potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, carrots, beets, turnips, and winter squash. Overwintered and cold-frame greens — kale, collards, spinach, mâche, and leeks — come in sweeter for the cold, and greenhouse microgreens and spinach add fresh color.
The season's first maple syrup arrives from the western Maryland sugarbush as freezing nights and thawing days start the sap running in Garrett and Allegany counties. Local honey, eggs, farmstead cheeses, and baked goods round out the indoor markets. Choose storage apples that are firm and heavy, pick overwintered greens with deep color and crisp stems, and keep maple syrup sealed in a cool place — refrigerate it after opening to slow any mold. Sweet potatoes hold best stored warm and dry, never in the refrigerator.
Night Sky This Month
February keeps the brilliant winter sky overhead while the cold, clear air still favors stargazing in Maryland. Orion stands due south in the early evening, flanked by the Winter Hexagon and trailed by his hunting dogs, with Sirius blazing low in the southeast and the Pleiades and Hyades clusters riding high in Taurus. As the evening lengthens, the faint sprawl of Cancer rises in the east, carrying the lovely Beehive Cluster (M44), an easy binocular target on a dark night.
There is no major meteor shower this month, so February rewards the patient observer with deep-sky objects in the crisp air — the Orion Nebula, the open clusters of Auriga, and the Andromeda Galaxy low in the northwest after dark. A dark site such as Assateague Island or the Garrett County highlands shows them best, well away from the light of the Baltimore–Washington corridor. The printable Maryland night-sky guide gives this year's planet positions and the dark-sky sites best suited to each region.
Butterflies & Pollinators
February holds Maryland's butterflies in their winter dormancy, but the very first flights are possible on the warmest days. The overwintering adults — mourning cloak, eastern comma, and question mark — wait behind loose bark and in woodpiles and brush along the Piedmont and Coastal Plain. On a sunny late-February afternoon when temperatures climb into the 50s or 60s, a mourning cloak may emerge to bask and patrol a sheltered woodland edge, the earliest butterfly Maryland produces.
The rest of the fauna remains hidden in earlier stages. Monarchs are still in Mexico, weeks from beginning their return north. The spring azure, one of Maryland's earliest fresh butterflies, waits as a chrysalis and will emerge in March with the first warmth. The zebra swallowtail overwinters as a chrysalis near the pawpaw thickets of the river bottoms, and the great spangled fritillary as a tiny larva in the leaf litter. Resist the urge to tidy the garden — the standing stems and fallen leaves are full of next season's butterflies.
Trees This Month
February is when Maryland's trees first stir. The earliest bloom comes from the wetlands, where red maple opens its tiny red flowers before the leaves, casting a rosy wash over the swamps and stream edges statewide, joined by the early silver maple along the river bottoms. The drooping catkins of alder, hazelnut, and the American elm lengthen and shed pollen, and the buds of the red and silver maples swell visibly on warm days.
The evergreens still hold the only full green. On the Coastal Plain, loblolly pine and glossy American holly dominate the winter woods, with eastern red cedar in the old fields; in the cold western mountains, eastern hemlock and red spruce stand dark against the snow. This is still the best month to read the bare structure and bark of the hardwoods — the blocky bark of white oak, the muscled gray trunk of American hornbeam along the streams, and the pale flaking sycamore — before the buds break and the canopy closes again.
Go deeper with the Maryland guides
The complete Maryland birding, native-plant, wildflower, and night-sky guides — or the whole year in one bundle.
Same month elsewhere: February in Massachusetts · February in Michigan · February in Minnesota