Waterbirds are often used as the important indicator species to assess the health of the wetland ecosystem, and they are vulnerable to wetland degradation and anthropogenic disturbance. With the rapid development of oil extraction in China's Bohai Bay, some parts of the waterbird habitats in this bay have been occupied, which may have influence on the waterbirds in this area. In this study, we selected the Yellow River Delta Nature Reserve (YRD) in Shandong Province as our study site, and then set 4 sampling areas in YRD for waterbird surveys and further analysis. We used the line transects to survey waterbirds in YRD at different oil well densities in March, May, June, July and September, 2021, and then combined deep learning and visual interpretation to process remote sensing imagery to quantify the density of oil wells. Generalized linear model was used to analyze the relationship between waterbird abundance and well density and the distance from oil wells, Mantel analysis was used to check for differences in waterbird community composition, and two-factor Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was used to test the effect of well density and distance from oil wells on waterbird diversity indices. A total of 38994 waterbirds were recorded in the sampling areas in YRD, belonging to 77 species, 14 families, and 7 orders. The results revealed that (1) the Shannon-Wiener index of waterbird community increased as oil well density increased, while the abundance tended to increase firstly and then decrease. The abundance of shorebirds was significantly higher in medium-low and medium-high density areas than in low density areas, whereas the abundance of other waterbirds did not show significant differences. The well density were positively related to the β-diversity of the waterfowl community. (2) The Shannon-Wiener index of waterbird community tended to decrease when the distance from oil wells increased. Specially, the abundance of Anseriformes increased when their distance from oil wells increased whereas other waterbird showed no significant trends. (3) The interaction between oil well density and distance from oil wells had no significant effect on the waterbird diversity index. Our study demonstrated that the oil well density has impacts on the waterbird community diversity and community composition in YRD, which may martly be attributed to the characteristics of oil extraction and the adaptability of different waterbird groups to human activities. The distance from oil wells also has effect on the spatial distribution of waterbird communities, and the adaptability of different species to disturbance and their habitat preferences may be responsible for this effect.