Smith Island Tours: News & Recognition

Smith Island Pelican Tours in the news! Click below for articles about and awards for our Smith Island Pelican Tours!




Click here to read “Smith Island’s Special Guests” in Chesapeake Bay Magazine, courtesy of our friend Wayne Bierbaum! (June 22, 2023)

Check out the fabulous story in the Washington Post about the Smith Island Pelican Tours from our friend Andrea Sachs! You may need a subscription to read the story.

Click here to listen to our first foreign language press! Thanks to our friend Katrin Brand, Bureau Chief & Radio Correspondent for ARD German Radio, for joining us in June 2022. We look forward to birding with our German friends soon!

Photo credit: Blair Caldwell

Click here to read “The Galápagos of the Chesapeake Bay” in the February 2022 issue of AAA World Magazine, courtesy of our friends Theresa Medoff and Blair Caldwell!

Photo credit: Khai Nguyen

Check out this wonderful article that appears in the March 2022 issue of the Photographic Society of America Journal, courtesy of our friend Khai Nguyen!

Watch the videos from WBOC TV16’s Outdoors Delmarva!

Smith Island Brown Pelicans, Part 1

Smith Island Brown Pelicans, Part 2

Award-winning Brown Pelican Colony Tours

Delmarva Birding Weekends has run birding tours on Smith Island for more than 25 years. In Summer 2018, we worked with the Smith Island community to launch tours to safely view the Brown Pelican nesting colonies.

The tours were very popular and well-received by our guests and partners. In November 2018, Delmarva Birding Weekends​, along with Worcester County Tourism​ and Somerset County Tourism​, was presented with the Transactional Opportunities Award for these birding experiences from Maryland​ Tourism during the Maryland Tour & Travel Summit.

Top photo, left to right: Julie Widdowson, Director of Somerset County Tourism; Dave Wilson, Delmarva Birding Weekends; Liz Fitzsimmons, Director of the Maryland Division of Tourism, Film and the Arts; Lisa Challenger, Director of Beach and Beyond/Worcester County Tourism; Mike Gill, Maryland Secretary of Commerce; Rick Howarth, President of Six Flags America and Chair of the Maryland Tourism Development Board; Jim Rapp, Delmarva Birding Weekends; Duke Marshall, Owner of Drum Point Market and Chair of the Somerset County Tourism Commission. Brown Pelican photo courtesy of Nienke DC. Sunset birding photo courtesy of John Whaley.

The award was presented for successfully creating tourism products and programming to bring in revenue. The award recognized our summer 2018 Smith Island Pelican Tours and Maryland coastal bays Sunset Seabird Safaris. Read more here.