The New Jersey side
Higbee Beach
Eleven hundred and fifty-nine acres of dune, woodland, scrub and field on the Delaware Bay shore, with about a mile and a half of beach. It is a state wildlife management area rather than a bathing beach, and in autumn it is one of the great bird spectacles in North America.
Why the birds stack up here
Look at a map of New Jersey and follow it south. It narrows to a point.
Migrating birds heading south down the Atlantic Flyway funnel into that point, and then they hit the water — the mouth of Delaware Bay, and the open crossing to Cape Henlopen on the other side. Small birds will not start that crossing in a headwind. So they stop, and they wait, and they feed, and they build up in enormous numbers in the last patch of cover before the water.
Higbee Beach is that last patch of cover.
This is the same geography that put guns on both capes. Everything has to go through the gap between Cape May and Cape Henlopen, or wait at the edge of it — ships, submarines, and warblers. The bunker down the road exists for exactly the same reason the birds are here.
In spring and summer the breeding list includes blue grosbeak, indigo bunting, yellow-breasted chat and prairie warbler. The site is also known for dragonflies and butterflies, which follow the same funnel.
What the place is like
It is not one habitat. New Jersey manages it as dunes, forest, scrub-shrub and fields, and the mix is the reason so much lives here.
The wooded parts hold holly, red cedar, sassafras, persimmon, northern bayberry, scrub oak, wild black cherry, wax myrtle and beach plum — a low salt-tolerant forest that grew up on and stabilized the dunes. There is a rare orchid in there too.
About two miles of trails run through it, and it is managed by the New Jersey Division of Fish and Wildlife.
Named corners
| Davey's Lake | Dug in 1910 by the Cape May Sand Company. About 300 yards by 90, and 12 feet deep. |
|---|---|
| Hidden Valley | A 92-acre farm bought by the state in 1986. |
| Signal Hill | The high ground. |
| Pond Creek, Sassafras Island, the Magnesite Plant site | The rest of the named ground within the management area. |
The ghost tracks
Every so often, after the right storm strips the sand off the beach, a set of railroad tracks appears.
They are the remains of a sand-mining railway from the early 1900s, and they surface and disappear again on no schedule anybody can predict — notably in 2014, and several times since. There is no point planning a trip around them. If they are showing when you are there, you got lucky.
Stone hunting
Cape May diamonds are common here, and that fact quietly undermines the story that the shipwreck at Sunset Beach is what concentrates them — because there is no shipwreck here.
This is a wildlife management area, not a beach resort. There are no lifeguards and no facilities, access points and rules are set by New Jersey Fish and Wildlife rather than a municipality, and parts of it are managed for nesting and migration. Check the current rules before you go, particularly if you plan to bring a dog or collect anything.