A walk along the promenade

Today's Guardian Country Diary describes a visit to the coast just north of the mouth of the river Wear at Sunderland. 

Roker pier, at the mouth of the river, is a good place to watch turnstones that hang around waiting to pick up tit-bits that anglers on the pier drop when they re-bait their hooks. These birds have become remarkably tame, unlike their conspecifics a little further along the coast (see below) that are far more wary.

The first hint of a fishing line being reeled in and food becoming available and the turnstones close in ....

A little further along the coast, at Cannonball Rocks, there's a promenade cafe where you can get more than a splash of milk in your cup of tea if you're not careful, but it's a sunny, sheltered spot to sit and watch shipping entering and leaving the harbour....

.... and to warm your hands around a mug of tea.

As soon as you get onto the promenade at Seaburn you meet these very attentive flocks of starlings .....

.... loitering around the benches, waiting for someone to chuck them a chip from their fish 'n' chips. There's a bit of a dependency culture developing amongst some bird species along this coast.

Our destination was Whitburn rocks, always a good place to watch waders as the rising tide pushes them further up the beach. This little group of sanderlings raced down the beach following every retreating wave, picking up invertebrates, .....

....then raced back again, just keeping ahead of boiling surf that threatened to engulf them

At this end of the promenade turnstones behave the way they are supposed to behave, flipping over seaweed and stones in their hunt for food.

The rich mottled brown plumage on their backs blends with the piles of wracks and kelps, providing ...

... excellent camouflage, in comparision to paler sanderlings that were forced to join them in the pools between the piles of seaweeds, while they waited for the tide to fall and expose their preferred sandy habitat again.

If you just sit on the shingle beach here and wait for the tide to push the sanderlings towards you they approach quite closely, but they move so fast that the closer they get, the harder they are to follow. Lovely little birds, though.

And finally, more free-loading birds - gulls following an inshore fishing boat as it heads out of the Wear into the North Sea on the flood tide.

Rock of Ages

The Durham coast isn’t a top destination for fossil hunters, who find richer pickings further south under the crumbling cliffs around Whitby, but occasionally interesting fossils do turn up on our beaches. I found one has week, on Blast beach just south of Seaham, which gave a tantalising glimpse of how the landscape might have looked three hundred million years ago.

Blast beach was formerly a site for dumping colliery waste but in recent years the magnificent Turning the Tide project has made great strides in restoring this coastline to its former, pre-industrial glory. There are still large boulders on the beach that were transported with colliery debris and it was when I split one of these that I found the remains of a plant that had been embedded in the rock for three hundred million years.   The compressed, jointed stems, now turned to stone, belonged to a giant horsetail.If you double-click for a larger image you can see that there are two reasonably intact compressed fossil stems here - one running at an 11 'o'clock to five o'clock angle and the other running eight o'clock to two o'clock.

Back in the Carboniferous, when the coal measures and the land mass that is now Britain was nearer the equator, these strange plants formed tropical, forests in swamps that would have been home to early amphibians and giant dragonflies.

Horsestails still exist today, as 'living fossils', but are a pale shadow of their extinct ancestors. Gardeners are familiar with the field horsetail, which is a troublesome weed but only grows about a foot tall. Today specimens of the great horsetail, the largest horsetail species that grows in damp places along this coast, reach a height of about five feet. Judging by the width of the fragment of fossil stem that I found, this long-extinct plant must have been at least four times as tall. Larger fossils that have been found indicate that these ancient plants sometimes grew to a height of sixty feet or more. 

Fog and Fungi

A while back I posted about threats to the future of the Bishop of Durham's deer park at Auckland Park, in Bishop Auckland in County Durham. Thankfully these seem to have abated, much to the relief of all those who love the place. It's one of our favourite Sunday morning walks - even in the fog.

The park is at its best in autumn ....

.... especially when fog adds a touch of liquid magic to the spiders' webs.

I think it was Oliver Rackham, the noted tree and woodland expert, who once remarked that the only thing more useful to wildlife than a live tree was a dead tree. He was referring to the vast range of organisms - invertebrates, fungi, etc. - that live in or on the dead wood during a tree's protracted afterlife. Whoever manages the park at Bishop Auckland leaves plenty of dead wood for the benefit of organisms that thrive on it - like these tiers of bracket fungi (Ganoderma sp. I think) in the hollow trunk of this dead beech.

Some of the living beeches are under attack by honey fungus and their days are numbered - but there are also plenty of healthy trees and some replanting.

The stumps of old sweet chestnuts host these developing puffballs.

Sycamore, with the black spots of Rhytisma acerinum on the leaf blade.

Some of the living trees have magnificent rings of toadstools around their bases - I guess that these are a mycorrhizal species, that exist in a mutually beneficial association with the trees.

Not sure what these are, on a decaying beech stump. During the prolonged afterlife of the dead trees a whole succession of toadstools appear, some for just a few days.