On the first Saturday of October, 1812 Park fills up. Freedom Boat Club runs canal tours out of City Dock, Chuckles the Pirate does balloon art for the kids, and a fiddler named Jgar plays through the afternoon while the Cannonball House opens its doors for free. This year marks the 30th running of Boast the Coast, and the Lewes Merchants' Fall Sidewalk Sale spreads across three days around it, with most of the shops in the historic district pulling racks onto the sidewalk. The next morning, the crowd shifts a few blocks over to the University of Delaware's Hugh R. Sharp campus on Pilottown Road for the 50th Coast Day, an event that typically draws more than 5,000 people to tour research vessels and peer into touch tanks.
None of that is where this story is going. A few miles down Cape Henlopen Drive, past the bathhouse, a much smaller crowd has already been showing up every day since September 1, and they are not looking at boats.
They are looking up, from a viewing platform built on top of a World War II bunker, at birds that have no idea any of this town is having a weekend.
A Season That Started Weeks Ago
The Cape Henlopen Hawk Watch runs September 1 through November 30 every year, a season that started nearly a month before Boast the Coast even got its banner up. The platform sits about 20 meters above sea level on top of one of the concrete bunkers built into this stretch of coast during the war, and it has been staffed in some form since 1995, making it one of the longer-running raptor count stations on the Atlantic side of the country.
The people doing the actual counting change year to year. This season's counter is Emma Hovland, who arrived with hawk-counting experience from South Carolina and Colorado and a resume that also includes fieldwork on sharp-tailed grouse and piping plovers, according to both the Sussex Bird Club and the Delaware Ornithological Society. She is not up there alone. The watch is organized under the Hawk Migration Association of North America, with Sussex Bird Club volunteers helping scan the sky most days from roughly 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., weather permitting.
What she and the volunteers are tracking is a specific, named migration route. Cape Henlopen's count feeds into what raptor researchers call the Coastal Migration Route, distinct from the Piedmont route that Delaware's other hawk watch, at Ashland Nature Center near Hockessin, tracks further inland. The distinction matters for what shows up. Cape Henlopen sees more falcons and ospreys than Ashland does, a difference tied directly to the coastline itself.
The Number That Undersells a Good Year
Fall 2024 produced 19 species and 9,044 raptors counted from the platform, a 22.5 percent jump over the 2023 season, according to Delaware's Division of Fish and Wildlife. That reads like a strong year, and by the site's own recent history it was one. But both of Delaware's hawk watches, Cape Henlopen and Ashland, have individually topped 20,000 birds in a single season before. A 22.5 percent increase in 2024 still landed at less than half of what the platform has produced in its best years.
That gap is not a sign of decline. It is a reminder that the count runs on weather, not effort. A push of northwest wind behind a cold front can move thousands of raptors past the platform in a single afternoon, while a stretch of calm southerly wind produces a trickle. The counters are not measuring how many hawks exist. They are measuring how many decided to fly on any given day, which is a different kind of number and a harder one to predict from a Saturday morning drive out to the park.
Some of what shows up has nothing to do with weather patterns at all. The platform has logged a Crested Caracara in 2016 and a Snowy Owl in 2024, both well outside their expected range, the kind of sighting that turns a routine count day into the reason a birder tells the story for years.
The Bunker Underneath the Platform
Here is the part that does not show up on the Hawk Watch's own event listings. The concrete the platform sits on was never built with birds in mind.
Fort Miles went up at Cape Henlopen starting in 1938, funded a few years earlier and named in 1941 for Lieutenant General Nelson A. Miles, built specifically to defend the mouth of Delaware Bay and the shipping lanes running up to Wilmington and Philadelphia from the German surface fleet. Between 1939 and 1942, the Army built eleven concrete fire control towers along the Delaware coast, structures engineered to last about 20 years. They are still standing more than 80 years later.
The towers worked in pairs, and the method was triangulation. A spotter in one tower would take a bearing on a ship, a second spotter in another tower miles away would take a separate bearing on the same ship, and where the two sightlines crossed on a plotting board back at the fort gave the ship's exact position. Do it again 30 seconds later and you have the ship's course and speed too. The distance between the towers was not incidental. It was the measuring instrument itself, which is why the towers were spread out along the shore rather than clustered at the fort.
Only one of Delaware's eleven towers, Tower 7 in the Fort Miles Historic Area, has been renovated with a modern steel staircase and opened for public climbing. Its counterpart across the bay stands at Cape May Point, New Jersey, the last freestanding tower left in that state, poured in two and a half days in June 1942. The Cape May-Lewes Ferry crosses the roughly 85 minutes of water between them, the same stretch the towers were built to watch. The guns those towers were aiming never fired at an enemy ship. The closest the war came to this stretch of coast was in May 1945, when the German submarine U-858 surrendered in the waters offshore, just days after Germany's surrender in Europe.
The Same Funnel, Read Two Different Ways
The connection is not decorative. Raptors migrating down the Atlantic coast are reluctant to strike out over open water, so they follow the shoreline south, and Cape Henlopen is where that shoreline runs out before the bay crossing forces a decision. Birds concentrate here for the same geographic reason the Army needed two towers on either side of the bay mouth: this is the point where the coast narrows into a single, exposed lane before the open water begins.
The soldiers in the tower were watching for a threat crossing that lane from the sea. The volunteers on the platform now are watching for movement crossing it from the sky. Different centuries, different reasons to look, same stretch of coastline doing the funneling.
Getting Out There This Fall
The Hawk Watch platform is near the park's bathhouse area, a short walk from the large picnic pavilion, and standard Cape Henlopen State Park entrance rules apply. If you are already in town for Boast the Coast weekend or the sidewalk sale, the platform is close enough to fold into the same day, though the two scenes could not feel more different: one is a town square with a fiddler, the other is a quiet crowd with binoculars watching for whatever the wind brings.
If you would rather approach from the bike path, the Junction and Breakwater Trail connects the park directly into both Lewes and Rehoboth Beach, so the ride out doubles as a way to see how the same coastline reads from ground level instead of from 20 meters up. The Sussex Bird Club also takes volunteers at the platform itself, no experience necessary, if a few hours of sky-watching sounds better than another turn around the sidewalk sale.
The season runs through the end of November. The best flights tend to follow a cold front, when temperatures drop and the wind swings out of the northwest, so the emptiest-looking days at the platform are often the ones right before the biggest ones.
If you're curious what else is worth knowing about this stretch of the Lewes calendar, from the ferry terminal to Shipcarpenter Street, Denise Karas keeps track of it alongside everything else that changes with the season here.
