Find of the day

We took our little puppy to the beach today and found a couple of things.  Puppy snatched and gobbled down a slug on the grass off the shore LOL

Visit to a wide west beach

Lowtide gradually leaves a temporary
pathway to the small rocky island offshore.

This wide west beach has the widest variety of shells and they are all minute. Absolutely tiny.


Whilst the other beaches dotted around the island have very strict monoculture i.e. cockles only, razorpods only, horseshoe limpets only. This beach has so many different kinds of shells and the only one that you find bluerayed limpets. There are also loads of jingleshells.

The tiny, tiny shells that wash up and are left on the tide line must mean that there is an active growing community BUT no bigger shells except very old ones high, high up on the beach right near the dunes.


What does this say for the health of the beach and why are there no bigger ones? Why so many tiny, tiny one's the whole season/year?


This beach has consistently very high winds, especially in winter but even in summer. Though not on the day we visited. We have had a week of very calm weather and we took full advantage :) There is a small rocky island just off shore as well as rocks on the beach opposite and left. The rest is just wide open beach with none of the large pebbles that decorate or occupy the other west beaches.


Does this make a difference to the wonderful sea creatures whose shells make up this wide, west beach? Yet other west beaches a couple of miles on each side of this one don't have the variety.

This photo shows 2 blue rayed limpets,

a spiral shell, a tiny scallop type shell and a very tiny spiral shell

next to the brown striped one.

The rocks on the shore and the

small rocky island just off the beach.

A spotted crab claw

This photo below shows a patch of

very old shells right up near the dunes.

Bird prints marching along the sand.
The pathway to the beach.
Where the pathway meets the beach.

This dune grass is very tough and scratchy to walk through.
A dune snail.

Beautiful Shells from Hawaii

Have a look at this website - http://www.monicabytheshore.com/

Great shell site to buy shells online :)

This is such a cool website - check it out!!

http://www.buythesea-bymail.co.uk/natural-shells-15-c.asp?gclid=CNbOhMSXo6QCFYGX2AodQE1s5w

New Book & Shells

There are only a few types of shells you get where we live and there are a lot of them but not much variety. Here we get only scallops, cockles, razor pods, topshells and blue ray limpets.

These are really nice shells BUT that's about it. I love learning a lot about shells and thought it would be nice to see some that we don't get here.

So we bought a new book on www.amazon.com for looking at other shells around the world: Usborne Sporter's Guides SHELLS.

Its got shells all over the world.

We also bought some shells with the book and there are some really fun ones. A couple got broken in the post but there are still a lot of one we have not seen before.

Here are some of the unusual ones we dont get here in the Western Isles.

These ones are more common but they are still nice.

Some of them we get here but mostly the ones on the beach are getting smaller and smaller, except for the old shells on isolated beaches. This comes from over harvesting (for eating) in the near and distant past but hopefully there are still enough to recover if they are given a chance.

Most people don't realise how critical the little creatures are, whose shells make up the beach 'sand'.

If they are over harvested or their environment is endangered by pollution - then there will be no more of the beautiful beach sand that makes up the magnificent stretches of beaches.

Saturdays Finds

The long east beach of an adjoining island was sadly almost free of finds.

This is a small group of tiny, tiny shells and things we found. That was all. The long, long beach was empty of anything really :(

There were a group of newly washed up creels, each infested with algae and seaweed. The creels were all damaged and remained unclaimed. Perhaps dislodged in a storm and finally washed to shore? They were not there two weeks ago. We wondered what creatures had been trapped inside and for how long. Were the damaged sides a sign that the catches had escaped or had the creels been damaged by a larger prey as feasted on as a form of convenient takeaway? We though of creatures trapped in creels that were not regularly checked and how they remained trapped inside for ..........how long?

There were a number of large mussles shells strewn in a area of the dunes - the feast of a bird? They were all opened but this has not been seen anywhere before. The muscles round the shores are all very small. If birds havest you will find the dmaged shells that have been dropped on rocky areas and broken open. These were all large and over an area of about 6 meters up the dunes, just off the beach. There was a new blow out next to this area that we noticed when we went up to explore the empty muscles shells. Perhaps tourists camping on the machair on above and flinging down the shells to the beach below? The blowout was a very interesting one and like a shielded bowl shape with a hidden interior. I climbed up and lay there for a while enjoying the peace and seclusion. We did not take the camera though.....

Climbing down carefully, so as not to disturb the dune sides leading to the beach (preventing erosion), we carried on walking along the last hightide line . A few strands of dried seaweed, tiny hsells and a couple of tiny crabs. We were so intent on what we could find that we almost walked into a crouched beach dog. They li in wait on the beach all day for their fishermen owners. Occassionally you can get them to play with you. My sister found a rare piece of wood above the blowout but it had a nail in so we floated it out to sea.

Driftwood is so full of character and life and when if finds it way to the beach the locals just burn it for fire wood. SO SAD! It should be treasured as a gift from the sea. This piece was still in its plank form and could have done with some character.

The dog followed us in his sheepdog way. It was a very old dog and not to steady on it feet, or perhaps it had been at the whiskey?

We found some shells, some remains of eggs on a piece of seaweed, some tiny crab shells (moulted) of different colours. Sadly the crab shells disintergrate when you carry them and so they dont last long. I noticed this interesting bit on on e of the hind legs of the one crab. I want to find out what it is.

In the blow out I found this really interesting shell I have not seen before. We have some sea shell books and sea shore books so I will have a look and see if I can find it.

So not much to see on the beach :( We went to my blue rayed limpet beach last week. Not much to see either. A big long piece of black tube washed up like a gigantic elephant truck and it was so heavy and stiff it would not budge. The shells were so tiny and few. It was high tide and nothing to see.

The beaches are so fragile that if something disturbs the balance then all those magical creatures whose shells make up the beach, disappear.

After winter storms you get a lot of things washing up but then its too wild to go walking out and the tons of seaweed that washup as well hide the finds.

We always think that considering how isolated these beaches all are and how few people there are, there really is not much to see? Very odd. You will almost never find others on the beach although there are a few. A couple of the beaches are so filled with shells but on a singular type in each beach (one kind of shell only) that there is no space to walk. Some huge pebble beaches and some plain sand ones. Large areas of rocky coast where we scramble form rock to rock looking into the rockpools but almost never found anything of interest. In other places in the world we have found so many things in the rock pools but here so little. So many years of overfishing perhaps??

This past winter some of the beaches have been rearranged but the beach where we were today is unchanged apart from the creels that washed up and the new blowout.