Delmarva Back Roads

Tundra swans at Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge  We spent the morning of the last day of summer exploring Bombay Hook Wildlife Refuge, created in 1937. It’s Delaware’s best-known birdwatching site, and Conde Nast Traveller has called it the most beautiful place in Delaware. The highlight of Bombay Hook is a 12-mile driving tour, peppered with five short walking trails, three of them leading to wildlife observation towers. There are two excellent maps to guide your drive. The  trail map highlights the locations of the five trails along the driving tour. The auto tour map highlights points of interest along the road. The first stop on the driving tour is the Raymond Tower Trail. The trail goes through woodland to a viewing tower over Raymond Pool. Raymond Pool at Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge The next stop is the boardwalk trail. There’s no parking lot here, so you’ll need to park along the narrow shoulders. There are some numbered stops along the trail, and ...

  One of the views along St. Jones Reserve's nature trail We spent 2020’s first day of Fall on one of the most beautiful and memorable walks we’ve ever taken, on a nature trail through St. Jones Reserve and Ted Harvey Conservation Area. St. Jones Reserve is on Kitts Hummock Road, just past John Dickinson Plantation. It’s part of the Delaware National Estuarine Research Reserve, so there’s research going on here as well as environmental protection and education.  Estuaries  are the intersections of land, fresh water, and salt water. St. Jones Reserve includes fresh water from the St. Jones River and its tributaries, salt marshes fed by the Delaware Bay, and forested and open land. The nature trail is to the right of the Center for Estuarine Studies, which was closed when we visited because of the pandemic. St. Jones Center for Estuarine Studies The trail begins just past a native plant garden. St. Jones native plant garden Part of the trail is a boardwalk over salt mar...

Pickering Beach has one of the nicest beaches we’ve seen so far along the Delaware Bayshore Byway. I had read that the beach is too full of shells and stones to go in the water. But when we visited, the beach was clean, with few pebbles or shells and none of the mud at some other bayshore beaches. The beach at low tide was wide and a really pleasant walk. Pickering Beach is also one of Delaware’s horseshoe crab sanctuaries. Horseshoe crabs come ashore here to spawn every May and June, and volunteers come to flip  the ones that have been turned upside down by the waves. Wayfinding sign on horseshoe crabs at Pickering Beach The community of Pickering Beach is more a hamlet than a town, just a strip of beachfront homes. I wonder how long it will be here. Like other Delaware bayfront communities, the beach vanishes at high tide. But here, unlike some other bayfront communities, many of the homes are very close to the high tide mark, so they can obviously be flooded in storms. We saw ...