Wildlife and Memories on a Delaware Beach

Many, many years ago, when I was young, I spent countless summer days down the Jersey Shore. Sand, sun, surf, and boardwalk arcades, all enjoyed with family and friends, were my carefree interests. The numerous sea gulls, crabs, and, especially, the jelly fish were an irritating distraction. Almost forty years later, I found myself a short distance across the Delaware Bay from New Jersey, in Rehoboth Beach for the very first time. While the beach fun was still a big draw, I spent a lot of time focused on the coastal wildlife, including even the gulls and crabs I used to eschew.

My sister's favorite New Jersey beach story is the time a sea gull grabbed a bagel sandwich from her hand. If she were to recount that tale today, I might ask here exactly what species of gull stole her breakfast. In Delaware, the most common gull was a black-headed variety, very likely a laughing gull. They teemed around the picnickers the day I visited Whiskey Beach in Cape Henlopen State Park, ready to snatch any morsel from a careless human. These birds didn't remind me of the white-headed, gray-winged birds I recall from my youth in New Jersey. However those animals looked a lot like another gull I eventually photographed in Delaware, a ring-billed.

Another soaring bird was a type of tern, much sleeker and more angular in appearance than any gull. In contrast were the less elegant-looking pelicans, usually in lines of three individuals as they flew close to the ocean's surface several hundred feet off shore. On the beach, just at the edge of the surf, flocks of sandpipers, possibly sanderlings, pecked at the sand as they scurried to avoid inundation. An approaching human or a strong wave often scared the birds into tight airborne formations that brought them to safety a hundred feet down the coast.

Ghost crabs stealthily crossed the dry sand of the beach above the tideline, sidestepping from one burrow to another. A memory from the Jersey shore reminded me that crabs (or some underwater creature!) used to prick my toes with their pincers when I tread on the sand in deeper water. My big brother said that I needed to keep the yellow side of my blow-up canvas raft facing up, with the blue side down, as not to attract even more of the crustaceans. In reality, maybe I was really supposed to be able to easily spot the brighter side of my raft if it got away from me when I was "creamed" by a monster wave.

Besides imaginary sharks lurking in the dark sea after the release of the movie "Jaws" in the summer of 1975, it was actual horseshoe crabs that terrified me in person. Hidden in indestructible-looking armor, the beasts occasionally populated the beaches by the scores. They bore spine-like tails that I was convinced could pierce the foot of an unsuspecting walker. Of course, we never saw a tail extended upright, and, in reality the horseshoe crabs used these appendages only to flip themselves right side up if overturned by a wave. And the animals are not even crabs; they're more closely related to spiders. Alas the one horseshoe crab I did encounter in Delaware was dead, slowly being washed further down the beach by the relentless surf.

However difficult it was to fathom, I witnessed a small pod of porpoises or dolphins a very short distance off the coast. Never in a million years did I ever imagine seeing a cetacean in the Atlantic Ocean off of New Jersey back in the 1970's and 1980's. I grew up in an era of oil blotches on the soles of my feet, red tide alerts closing favorite beaches, and garbage-laden barges heading out to their dumping grounds off the continental shelf. But there they were, in Delaware, at least two adult dolphins and a juvenile, breaking the surface and diving within a short swimming distance of me.

I wasn't in Saint Marten, far away in the Caribbean, where I might have actually seen my first dolphin or porpoise in the wild; I was in Delaware, a neighboring Mid-Atlantic State, a fact I learned in 7th grade Geography. My memories from many years ago in New Jersey didn't recall much of this marine and coastal life at all. Of course age and experience affected my mind and my interests. At the same time, much cleaner seas than I ever dreamed of has attracted more marine life.