Chincoteague Refuge: A Superhighway for Migrating Birds
Near Chincoteague, Virginia
Most people come to Chincoteague for the ponies, but the ponies are guests on land that was set aside for something else entirely. Birds. The Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge was established in nineteen forty three, and its original purpose was to protect migratory birds, especially migrating and wintering waterfowl, along a great aerial route called the Atlantic Flyway.
Twice a year, hundreds of thousands of birds pour up and down the East Coast, and this refuge is one of their most important rest stops. More than fourteen thousand acres of beach, dune, salt marsh, and maritime forest have recorded hundreds of species of birds. It is also a refuge in the truest sense for creatures on the edge of vanishing, including the Delmarva Peninsula fox squirrel and the tiny, sand colored piping plover that nests right on the open beach.
All of this makes it one of the most visited wildlife refuges in the entire country, with roughly one and a half million visitors a year. The best way to see it is the Wildlife Loop, a road around a freshwater pool. At certain hours it opens to cars, but at others it belongs to walkers and cyclists, and to the herons, egrets, and, yes, the wild ponies grazing in the marsh.
