Delaware Nature Guide: February 2026
February is late winter in Delaware — the coldest stretch on the calendar, yet the first stirrings of spring are already audible. Waterfowl still crowd the bay-shore refuges, but resident birds begin to sing on mild mornings, the earliest woodland flowers push up, and the marshes ready themselves for the great migration to come.
What to look for this week
- Tens of thousands of snow geese crowd the Bombay Hook impoundments, rising in roaring white clouds — the heart of Delaware's winter waterfowl spectacle.
- The Quadrantid meteor shower peaks in a short, sharp burst around January 3; watch the northeast after midnight from a dark Cape Henlopen or lower-Sussex site.
- A kitchen-table planning week — order seeds and sketch beds, leaving any snow banked over perennials as insulation against the coastal-plain freeze-thaw.
- American holly, the state tree, stands glossy and red-berried through the bare coastal-plain woods, the signature green of the Delaware winter.
Birds This Month
February is the last full month of Delaware's winter waterfowl season, and the refuges remain superb. Bombay Hook and Prime Hook still hold their snow geese, tundra swans, northern pintail, and assembled dabbling and diving ducks, but numbers begin to shift as the first red-winged blackbirds and common grackles return to the marsh edges and the days lengthen. Bald eagles are now nesting along the rivers and bay shore, refurbishing the huge stick nests that are a Delaware conservation success story.
On the ocean and at Cape Henlopen, wintering scoters, long-tailed ducks, red-throated loons, and gannets still work the cold water, with purple sandpipers on the jetties. In the woods and at feeders, the resident Carolina chickadees, titmice, Carolina wrens, and cardinals begin singing in earnest on warm mornings, and red-shouldered hawks call over the floodplain forests as the breeding season opens.
This month's tip: listen at dawn on a mild morning — the rising song of cardinals, Carolina wrens, and titmice is the first clear sign that the Delaware breeding season is stirring even before the ducks have left.
What's Blooming
February is the very edge of the Delaware flower year. In the mild lower counties and in sheltered spots, the earliest blooms appear: the strange maroon hoods of skunk cabbage push up through the muck of seeps and swamp edges, generating their own heat to melt the frost around them, and the first snowdrops and winter aconite open in old gardens and naturalized woodland edges. Witch hazel cultivars and the native spicebush swell their buds, and in protected hollows along White Clay Creek the rosettes of the coming spring ephemerals press against the leaf litter. The marshes still hold the tan structure of winter — cordgrass and switchgrass standing through the frost — and the red berries linger on winterberry and American holly. It is a slow, expectant month, the dormant landscape just beginning to crack open.
Garden This Month
February is the turning point in the Delaware garden — still winter, but the indoor season begins in earnest. Start onions, leeks, and slow flowers like snapdragons and lisianthus under lights early in the month, then sow the first tomatoes and peppers toward its end for transplants ready when the long First State season opens. This is the prime window for dormant pruning: shape apples, pears, and the state's heritage peaches while the branches are bare and the disease pressure is lowest, and cut back summer-blooming shrubs and grasses before new growth begins.
On a mild day when the soil is workable — most likely in the lower counties — you can direct-sow the hardiest crops: peas, spinach, arugula, fava beans, and radishes all tolerate Delaware's late-winter cold. Keep cold frames and low tunnels vented on sunny afternoons so overwintered greens do not overheat. Cut last year's perennial stalks and ornamental grasses down to the ground before new shoots appear, and top-dress beds with compost. The pace is quickening, and the first sowings of the year are within reach.
Zone 7a (northern New Castle County): still firmly dormant in the coldest part of the state — finish dormant pruning of fruit trees and shrubs on mild days, and start onions, leeks, and the slowest seedlings indoors under lights for an early start.
Zone 7b (Kent, Sussex, and the coast): the mildest corner can sometimes turn the soil late in the month — direct-sow the first peas, spinach, and fava beans in a workable bed, and keep cold frames cracked on sunny days so overwintered greens do not cook.
What's at the Farmers Market
February is the leanest stretch of the Delaware market year, but the winter offerings hold steady. Storage crops still anchor the stands — sweet potatoes, white potatoes, onions, garlic, carrots, beets, turnips, cabbage, and winter squash — alongside the last of the storage apples from fall, eating crisp from cold storage. Heated hoop houses around Kent and Sussex keep the cold-hardy greens coming: frost-sweetened spinach, kale, collards, and tatsoi.
Look also for local honey, eggs, jarred preserves, and dried beans, and at some markets the first maple-style products and overwintered leeks and parsnips sweetened by months in the cold ground. Choose firm, heavy roots and squash with hard, unblemished rinds, and store them cool and dark to keep them sound. Greens from the hoop houses are at their sweetest now, the cold having concentrated their sugars; use them while crisp. The selection is narrow, but everything on the table is genuinely local through the depth of the off-season.
Night Sky This Month
February nights are still long and the brilliant winter constellations remain in command. Orion stands due south in the early evening, with Sirius blazing below in Canis Major and the Winter Hexagon — Sirius, Procyon, Pollux, Capella, Aldebaran, and Rigel — sprawling across the southern sky. The faint smudge of the Orion Nebula hangs in the Hunter's sword, a fine target for binoculars or a small telescope on a clear, cold Delaware night.
As the evening wears on, the spring sky begins to climb in the east: the backward question mark of Leo rises, signaling the coming season. There is no major meteor shower this month, so February is about the deep-sky jewels of winter — the Pleiades and Hyades clusters in Taurus, the Beehive cluster in Cancer, and the double cluster overhead. Seek the darkest skies at Cape Henlopen and along the lower Delaware coast, away from the Wilmington and Dover light.
Exact planet positions and this year's meteor timing change from year to year — the printable Delaware night-sky guide carries the current dates and visibility for your region.
Butterflies & Pollinators
Delaware sees essentially no butterfly flight in February — it is the heart of late winter, and only the most exceptional warm spell late in the month might rouse anything. The species that overwinter as adults are still in deep dormancy: the mourning cloak waits behind loose bark and in the leaf litter of the wooded ravines at White Clay Creek and along the Brandywine, and the eastern comma and question mark shelter in woodpiles and hollow trees, all of them able to fly on the first truly warm afternoon to come. The monarchs remain massed in the Mexican mountains, and Delaware's other swallowtails and brushfoots wait out the cold as chrysalides and eggs in the moist coastal-plain woods and old fields. This is the right time to finish planning a butterfly garden and to order native plants — common and swamp milkweed for monarchs, spicebush and sassafras for swallowtails, and a long succession of nectar flowers — so the plants are ready when the season finally turns.
Trees This Month
Delaware's trees are still bare and dormant in February, but the first subtle signs of the turn appear. The red maples in the wet woods and along the roadsides begin to swell their flower buds, ready to tint the swamps red at the first warmth, and the silver maples and American elms along the rivers are not far behind. The evergreens carry the woods as they have all winter — American holly, the state tree, glossy and red-fruited across the coastal plain, the dark loblolly pines of southern Sussex, and the eastern red cedars in the old fields.
The bare hardwoods are at their most readable now: the shaggy bark of shagbark hickory, the smooth gray columns of American beech still holding tan leaves, the corky ridges of sweetgum twigs, and the mottled trunks of sycamore bright along the Christina and Brandywine. Sap is beginning to stir; on a sunny February afternoon the buds of red maple and eastern redbud can be seen plumping, the first quiet promise of the spring that the bare First State woods will soon answer.
Go deeper with the Delaware guides
The complete Delaware birding, native-plant, wildflower, and night-sky guides — or the whole year in one bundle.
Same month elsewhere: February in Washington, D.C. · February in Florida · February in Georgia