Taking the eastern part of the Yellow River Delta and the northern part of the side-bend spur dikes as the study area, the tidal creek network was extracted by visual interpretation based on the eight-phase Landsat series remote sensing images from 1997 to 2021, and the evolution laws of tidal creeks were revealed by analyzing the characteristics of the number, length and density of tidal creeks in different periods. The results show that the whole life cycle of tidal creeks can be divided into four periods: juvenile, young, mature and degraded periods, among which the growth rates of the number and length of tidal creeks are the highest in the juvenile period, which are more than three times those of the young period. In the young period, the number and length of tidal creeks continue to increase, but their growth rate slow down significantly, and the tidal creek network system gradually stabilizes. In the mature period, the development of the tidal creek system is basically completed, and there is no significant change in the length, number and curvature of the tidal creeks. During the degraded period, some tidal creeks shrink, die, and are abandoned, with 10.8% of tidal creeks in group I dying each year from 2005 to 2007.