For a stretch of three years in the 1990s, I lived in the historic town of Lewes, Delaware, just a mile or two from Cape Henlopen, an enchanting scimitar of sand that curves into the Delaware Bay. My goal was to learn about the natural life around me, the birds, crabs, butterflies, fish, and how they thrived in a place part land, part sea. This book is the fruit of that exploration and discovery.
Now, more than two decades later, it’s reassuring to find that its observations still hold water. I love the cape and return to it often from my inland home in Virginia. On one recent visit in May after a long hiatus, I was happy to find the marshes and mudflats still reeking of the sea, and the sand flats just as I recall, astir with shorebirds: a large flock of peeps, semipalmated sandpipers, legs twinkling as they dash up and down with the surf, probing the back-sliding skim for choice morsels, fluttering up to escape the roaring wash; the piercing call of one willet ringing out, then two; an occasional tern, a “sea swallow,” hovering over the gray waves. I was also glad for that familiar, welcome conflict—to look up or down, to birdwatch or beachcomb. Jingle shells still litter the shoreline, along with channeled whelks and clam shells rayed with lavender. Out on the sea, pods of dolphin play the margins, and half a dozen brown pelicans circle slowly, deliberately, and settle on the flats.
During that May visit, I witnessed again the extraordinary spectacle that occurs predictably inside the elbow of the cape every year at high spring tide. Under the full moon, horseshoe crabs by the thousands crawl out of a silver sea in a clattering, grinding orgy, jostling to mate and deposit their tiny pearly green eggs in the warm sand high on the beach. They are resilient, persistent creatures, whose ancestors scuttled about in the Devonian seas four hundred million years ago. This bay, with its gently sloping beaches, remains the best spot on the planet for them to spawn—and as a consequence, is a magnet for magnificent gatherings of migratory shorebirds.
The next morning, on cue and with perfect timing, great flocks of birds dropped down from their flyways to feast on the energy-rich eggs. Sanderlings, red knots, ruddy turnstones, dunlins, short-billed dowitchers. The birds arrive all feather and bone after their long travels from wintering grounds in the tropics, half their usual body weight. They feed voraciously, quarreling and fretting, stabbing aggressively at the shallow pits in the sand to fill up on eggs before continuing their epic journeys—for some, a ten-thousand-mile fly from as far south as Tierra del Fuego to nesting grounds in the high Arctic.
The big planetary pulls and evolutionary forces that shape this coast remain at play today. Standing on the tip of the cape facing north, bay to my left, sea to my right, I’m pleased to see that this stretch of shore is as alive and rhythmic as ever, washed twice daily, inextricably tied to the cycles of moon and tides.
IT’S NOT THAT nothing has changed. Condominiums have cropped up like mushrooms after rain, crowding the dunes to the north and south. Fishing vehicles park thickly on the cape’s beaches. The canopy of nearly invisible rod lines descending from vehicle to sea make walking on the strand an exercise in back-bending limbo.
But change has always been the constant here, both human-made and natural. The mood of the shore, for instance, shifts radically with shifts in wind direction and weather. One day the wind is still, the sea smooth; the next it is howling, the sea roiling with heavy surf. One day is stark contrast, hot white and steel blue; the next all soft merges of gray, silver, taupe, and whey. Though the cape itself has existed for thousands of years, wind, waves, and currents alter its form on a daily basis. So does the rise in sea level, now more than ever. Over time it has molded and remolded the peninsula from its old shape as a cockscomb of curved spits to its present fingerlike profile.
Storms periodically smack into this bay, dramatically reconfiguring its coastline and beaches. The last big one to hit was in the winter of 2016, when a monstrous low-pressure system stretching from Pennsylvania to Alabama struck Delaware hard, raising a hurricane-like surge of water that flooded the coast and tore at the shoreline. Near the cape, the storm surge reached nine feet, approaching the previous record set more than a half century earlier, on Ash Wednesday, 1962. Blowing sand mixed with blowing snow to form giant drifts. Huge swaths of shoreline were washed out to sea, leaving gnawed-out scarps in their place.
Almost nothing here stands still.
That goes for wildlife, too. Populations rise and fall. Species come and go. Gone is the squawking colony of exotic monk parakeets I wrote about in this book, which for a decade or more had occupied a dozen communal nests in the loblolly pines edging a lake south of the cape. In their place are native waterfowl, rafts of noisy canvasback ducks, paddling furiously on the lake water and beating their wings before lifting off in a raucous squadron.
The populations of some shorebird species have taken a dive. Red knots, in particular, those elegant birds with cinnamon-colored bellies. In the past few decades, the numbers of red knots that breed in the Canadian Arctic has declined by 75 percent, and scientists are discovering why. Research shows that horseshoe crabs have been overharvested—first as fertilizer, then as bait for eel and whelk fishing, and also for a compound in their light blue blood useful for biomedical purposes—resulting in too few eggs to fuel the prodigious northern journey of the red knots, eighteen hundred miles in three days to their Arctic breeding grounds.
On the upswing is the piping plover, a demure little beach-nesting bird now slowly growing in number despite the dangers of feral cats and all-terrain vehicles. Likewise, the osprey—a sentinel bird here, arriving in March to signal spring, departing for its wintering grounds in September—is also gaining ground. The Delaware population is more robust than ever, with some two hundred nests producing young.
SCIENCE OF COURSE has shifted ground, too. For one thing, we now have a deeper understanding of the astonishing bird migrations that enliven this coast. In the past two decades, researchers have worked to unravel the mystery of navigation, how the migrating birds that flow past these shores find their way to and from their wintering and breeding grounds, even when weather forces them to detour hundreds or thousands of miles. Scientists believe the birds navigate with a map-and-compass system, a collection of remarkable cognitive tools that are the natural equivalent of our compasses, GPS, and satellite navigation. They use different kinds of information—from magnetic fields, sun and stars, landscape features, wind, sound, even smell—all funneled into their brains and used to guide them to their destination.
Brilliant bits of new technology such as satellite tracking devices can now chart a bird’s migratory journeys in stunning detail. Not long ago, one juvenile male osprey born at Cape Henlopen was tracked on his first fall migration southward. The young bird traveled a hundred miles a day, through the Carolinas, down the Florida Peninsula, and into the eye of a tropical storm in the Caribbean, which threw him hundreds of miles off course. After traveling close to forty-two hundred miles, he eventually settled at the end of an airport runway in the small city of Tefé, Brazil, and then, finally, on the shores of Lago Caiambé, deep in the heart of Amazonas. There he stayed for the next eighteen months before heading north again to his natal grounds along the Delaware Bay, illuminating the remarkable navigational skills and fidelity to breeding place that stamp these birds.
Other new science has bubbled to the surface. Not long ago, revelations emerged about the giant squid, Architeuthis dux—still largely a rumor of vague sightings and occasional washed-up twenty-two-foot tentacles when I wrote this book. The creature of Kraken legend was finally caught on camera for the first time in its natural habitat when scientists filmed the huge, pulsing beauty in the inky black waters off Japan at a depth of more than two thousand feet. The researchers used a quiet, unobtrusive submersible and lured the creature with flashing lights to imitate the bioluminescent displays of common deep-sea jellyfish. The video footage of the great cephalopod the size of a two-story house doing a kind of balletic limb-waving dance is breathtaking—and a powerful reminder of the fantastic creatures yet to be discovered in the 95 percent of ocean still unexplored.
There are no doubt other new findings since the first edition of this book. But for the most part, I’ve let the text stand, tweaking and revising only slightly.
TIME HAS PASSED, bringing change both expected and unexpected in my own life, too. The baby growing in me when I left the cape is now a woman in her twenties. My beloved husband, Karl, is no longer by my side. He died of cancer in 2016. The big gray Victorian house I lived in is a bit more run down, and the old hackberry that once shaded its porch and hosted a dark cloud of starlings was chopped down by a neighbor to make room for his swimming pool. The three bald cypresses Karl and I grew from seeds collected around hundred-year-old trees in Lewes and then planted in our Virginia garden have grown to impressive heights of forty feet. More land on the flat coastal plain around the Delaware Bay now belongs to the sea, and to the throngs of people visiting it. But despite the new bustle both in town and by the shore, there are still moments when the place feels timeless and wild. As on that warm spring night of my recent visit, when the air was cool, but the sand still held the day’s heat. The ghost crabs and shorebirds were shadows. The sounds, just wind in the dune grass and waves slapping on the beach.