Seashore. Nick Baker

      

       Dedication

      For my Dad. Many adventures were had on the beaches, cliffs and mud flats of the Isle of Wight. It was armed with shrimping net, mask and snorkel that I had my first real adventures.

      Contents

       Cover

       Titlepage

Dedication

The seashore

Life in stripes: zonation

Timetables of the tides

Handy stuff for exploring with

Rock pools

Handy stuff: mirror on a stick

The baiting game

Handy stuff: scavenger trap

Marvellous molluscs

Shell collecting

       See inside a sea shell

       Handy stuff: underwater window

       Snorkelling for softies

       Blobs!

       Crab hunting

       Crab catching

       Handy stuff: plankton net

       The fine, fiddly and frail

       Sandy shores

       Beachcombing

       Catching sand-living creatures

       Handy stuff: burrow box

       Studying seaweeds

       Preserving your seaweeds

       Sand hoppers

       Estuaries

       Mud lovers

       Grasping the razor

       The tray of revelations

       Shrimps and prawns

       Cliffs

       See sea birds

       Fossil hunting

       Sea watching

       Going Further

       Index

       Author’s Acknowledgements

       Keep Reading

       Copyright

       About the Publishers

       The seashore

      Lots of good things happen in nature when one thing meets another. These can be times of the day – for example, at twilight and dawn when night meets the day – or times of the year, when spring transforms into summer. Or they can be physical things, such as where a beach merges into another habitat, like the open sea.

      To naturalists, these times and places of transition are well known as they can concentrate periods of activity, making certain creatures easier to see. When spring finally arrives, we get a sudden rush of frenzied activity, birds sing, frogs spawn and flowers bud, and where one habitat blends into another, you often get a special kind of ‘edge’; a place that is inhabited by life from both places.

      In this book, we explore the seashore, a habitat that is probably one of the most exciting places a naturalist will ever get to explore and certainly one of my favourites. It is a unique place, a fringe of both the sea and the land, a narrow ribbon between the great ocean and the land mass against which it laps,