Wednesday 28 March 2012

A sunny day on the beach

The Safari lay awake waiting for the alarm clock to go off listening to the dawn chorus which is getting louder and more impressive every day now; no summer migrants yet though.
We reckon it’s the best its been for a coupla three years or more– despite the recent ravages of garden habitat locally during the last two or three summers – no ‘Silent Spring’ here thankfully. The Song Thrush could be heard from the Golden Triangle which was good as we’ve not heard him for a few days or more.
We didn’t get far on Patch 1 for the usual upside down dog reason; only far enough to watch the Goldfinches leaving their roost in a neighbours Holly tree.
Patch 2 gave us a hazy couple of hundred Common Scoters and two Red Throated Divers. A Skylark (P2 #51)  calling unseen overhead was a useful addition to the patch total
The morning was taken up with a very excited school group who found just about everything on offer between them. Namely...

Molluscs

Sea slug eggs- looked like a soft spotty horseshoe
Common Periwinkle
Common Whelk
Edible Mussel
Thin Tellin
Baltic Tellin
Bean-like Tellin
Iceland Cyprine – one of the worlds longest lived animals
Common Otter shell
Common Cockle
Prickly Cockle
Striped Venus shell
Rayed Trough shell
Banded Wedge shell – very important for the 10,000+ Common Scoter ducks that spend the winter just offshore
Common Razor
Pod Razor
Curved Razor – quite a good number of these which are not often found, perhaps because it has been so calm recently and they normally get broken up, being very fragile, in rougher weather.

Worms

Honeycomb Worm – stuck to the seawall, a nationally scarce animal
Spirorbis spirorbis tubeworm – inside an old pod razor shell
Pomatoceros  triqueter (?) tubeworm – inside an old pod razor shell
Sand Mason worm – only empty cases of silk stuck with grains of sand and bits of shell

Arthropods

Acorn Barnacles – not ID’d to species level for Year 2 children!
Green Shore Crab
Common Prawn – but no Brown Shrimps for comparison

Bryozoans

Horn Wrack – looks like pale brown seaweed but is actually a colony of thousands of tiny animals a bit like coral

Sea urchins

Sea Potato

Fish

Common Blenny

Sea weeds

Gut Weed
Sea Lettuce
Purple Laver
Spiral Wrack

Edible Whelk - no one home!
Green Shore Crab
Green Shore Crab
After they’d been the tide came in an erased all trace of their presence. With the tide we had two Guillemots both still in winter plumage and the same Common Scoters were out in the haze.
The children had their lunch our gardens and while they were out there we saw they were making Daisy Chains and 'admiring' (=picking!) our Coltsfoot.
Daisy - from Day's eye; so called cos the flower follows the sun from east to west during the day
Coltsfoot - so called because the leaves are hoof shaped
Also known as Son before fathers as the leaves appear after the flowers
Where to next? More of the same without the gang!
In the meantime let us know who's been ransacking your outback

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