McKee-Beshers Wildlife Management Area is a

Wildlife Management Area A Wildlife Management Area (WMA) is a protected area set aside for the conservation of wildlife and for recreational activities involving wildlife. New Zealand There are 11 Wildlife Management Areas in New Zealand: * Horsham Downs Wildlife Ma ...

Montgomery County, Maryland Montgomery County is the most populous county in the state of Maryland. As of the 2020 census, the county's population was 1,062,061, increasing by 9.3% from 2010. The county seat and largest municipality is Rockville, although the census-design ...

. It is a large contiguous forest of varied habitat, situated between the

Potomac River The Potomac River () drains the Mid-Atlantic United States, flowing from the Potomac Highlands into Chesapeake Bay. It is long,U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline dataThe National Map. Retrieved Augus ...

and the

Chesapeake & Ohio Canal The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, abbreviated as the C&O Canal and occasionally called the "Grand Old Ditch," operated from 1831 until 1924 along the Potomac River between Washington, D.C. and Cumberland, Maryland. It replaced the Potomac Canal, wh ...

to the south, and

Seneca Creek State Park Seneca Creek State Park is a public recreation area encompassing more than along 14 miles of Seneca Creek in its run to the Potomac River in Montgomery County, Maryland. The park features facilities for boating and fishing as well as trails f ...

to the east. Acres of sunflowers are planted each year at McKee-Beshers WMA to attract game birds. Every July, these spectacular fields in full bloom also draw photographers, garden enthusiasts, and tourists. In the 1950s this was the site of the Mills Cross Array, an early

radio telescope A radio telescope is a specialized antenna and radio receiver used to detect radio waves from astronomical radio sources in the sky. Radio telescopes are the main observing instrument used in radio astronomy, which studies the radio frequency ...

operated by the

Carnegie Institution of Washington The Carnegie Institution of Washington (the organization's legal name), known also for public purposes as the Carnegie Institution for Science (CIS), is an organization in the United States established to fund and perform scientific research. Th ...

which was the first instrument to detect radio waves from another planet (

Jupiter Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the List of Solar System objects by size, largest in the Solar System. It is a gas giant with a mass more than two and a half times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined, but ...

References

External links

McKee-Beshers Wildlife Management Area
Wildlife management areas of Maryland Protected areas of Montgomery County, Maryland {{Maryland-protected-area-stub