Birding
Birding in Delaware
Where to go, when it gets interesting, and what you need to know before you drive.
Delaware sits on the Atlantic Flyway with tidal marsh, ocean beach, Piedmont forest and cypress swamp squeezed into forty miles. You can see very different birds without driving very far.
This is about the trip around the birds: what it costs, when the gate opens, whether a scope earns its weight, which places work from the car, and which three days in autumn the roads shut completely. For sightings and live checklists I link to eBird rather than trying to rebuild it.
7 of the Delaware Birding Trail's 27 sites covered so far
Refuges
Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge
U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service · Smyrna
A twelve-mile drive through managed pools, salt marsh and mudflat, most of which you can bird without getting out of the car.
1 current closure
Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge
U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service · Milton
Marsh, and 7.5 miles of trails — but a lot of the best of it is birded from the county roads crossing the marsh rather than from any trailhead.
2 current closures
Places already on the site
These have full records already — hours, fees, facilities, the lot. The birding notes sit on those pages rather than in a second copy that could disagree with the first.
Cape Henlopen
State park
Coastal migration in autumn, and The Point — with the caveat that The Point is what closes for nesting birds.
Trap Pond
State park
Bald cypress at the northern edge of its range — a swamp habitat found nowhere else in the state.
White Clay Creek
State park
Woodland migrants and breeding forest birds — the inland counterweight to a state known for its coast.
Brandywine Creek
State park
Piedmont forest and open meadow within half an hour of Wilmington.
Ashland Nature Center
Nature center
Delaware Nature Society's hawk watch site, with banding and a Motus tower — the place to start if you want somebody to show you how.
What isn't here yet
20 of the Birding Trail's sites have no useful page here — Woodland Beach, Little Creek, Ted Harvey, Milford Neck, Slaughter Beach, Assawoman, the Great Cypress Swamp and the rest. They exist and they're good. I just haven't checked them, and a list of names with nothing behind it is what every other birding page in Delaware already gives you.
Where the birds actually are
Sightings, checklists and live reports belong toeBird, and to the people who keep it up. TheDelaware Ornithological Society,Delaware Audubon and theDelaware Nature Societyrun walks and field trips with people who know far more than I do. Go with them.
One thing this section won't do
It won't publish precise locations for active nests, rare breeders or roosts where being found is the problem. Where a manager closes a beach or withholds a location, that closure is the fact worth having — not a way around it. Getting a better look is never worth more than the bird.