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 (United States), county in the U.S. state of Maryland. As of the 2020 United States census, the county's population was 1,062,061, increasing by 9.3% from 2010. The county seat is Rockville, Maryland ...

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

Potomac River The Potomac River () is in the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic region of the United States and flows from the Potomac Highlands in West Virginia to Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. It is long,U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography D ...

and the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal 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, United States. The park features facilities for boating and fishing as w ...

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 (radio), 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 r ...

operated by the

Carnegie Institution of Washington The Carnegie Institution for Science, also known as Carnegie Science and the Carnegie Institution of Washington, is an organization established to fund and perform scientific research in the United States. This institution is headquartered in W ...

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 Jupiter mass, mass more than 2.5 times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined a ...

References

External links

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