Ackerman - Birds by the shore: observing the natural life of the atlantic coast

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, its 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 conflictto 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 spawnand 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 journeysfor 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, Im 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.

I T 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 capes 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.