Assateague sits on the Atlantic Flyway — a superhighway for millions of migrating birds. Spring and fall turn the island into a crowded rest stop.
If you're rolling through in spring or fall, look up and around, because you may be sharing this island with a crowd you didn't expect — millions of birds. Assateague sits square on the Atlantic Flyway, the great aerial highway that migrating birds follow up and down the East Coast between their northern breeding grounds and their winter homes to the south.
Twice a year, this island becomes a rest stop on that journey — a place to drop in, refuel on all that marsh and shallow-water life, and rest up before the next long haul. In fall, watch the sky for long, wavering lines of snow geese and Canada geese, and the marsh for waves of ducks settling in. Shorebirds work the beach and the flats in astonishing numbers. Songbirds pour through the forest. Birders come from all over just to stand here in October with binoculars and let the sky move past them.
It's a good reminder of what this scrubby, salt-bitten island really is. It looks like the edge of nowhere — but to the natural world it's a vital crossroads, a filling station on a journey thousands of miles long, used by more travelers in a single season than this road will ever see. Keep an eye on the sky.
Photo: U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service - Northeast Region · Public domain
.jpg){kind=link}