I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and sky ....

I must go down to the sea again,
to the lonely sea and sky,
I left my shoes and socks there,
I wonder if they're dry

Spike Milligan

Well, I did go down to the sea again today but kept my shoes and socks on, because it was hellish cold - but it was a great way to spend a Saturday.

After a browse around Tynemouth Market, we walked out onto Tynemouth piers ....

.... where we encountered this very handsome pigeon, with beautiful orange eyes and iridescent throat plumage, before we headed along the path to North Shields for fish and chips in the excellent Waterfront fish and chip restaurant ...

... passing these busy purple sandpipers that were feeding along the sea wall while they waited for the tide to turn.

After that we had a quick stroll alone Union Quay where this black-headed gull and ...

..... herring gull posed for portraits

As we walked back to the car park someone threw chips to the herring gulls, so predictably all hell broke loose as they scrambled for them. A  cacophony of herring gulls.

Then it was off along the coat to St.Mary's island, where the sun came out.

Lots of these beautifully patterned grey top shells Gibbula cineraria under the rocks around the rock pools...

 .... and even more of these hermit crabs to tease, by turning them upside down ...

..... and watching their contortions as they were forced to come out of  their shells to right themselves.

One very disgruntled hermit crab.

Armchair rockpooling

Felt a sudden urge to do a bit of rock-pooling at the weekend so called in at Marsden bay near South Shields, to see it there was anything interesting on the shore. This is an exposed coast and it's early in the season so were weren't expecting to find much.

There were plenty of common limpets on top of the rocks and ...

..... lots of chitons aka polyplacophorans aka coat-of-mail shells underneath rocks. But not a lot else. 

It was freezing cold and blowing a gale, which dimmed my enthusiasm when my hands began to turn blue. So I collected a small tuft of red seaweed that I found growing in a rock crevice and carried it home in a vial of seawater (about an egg cup-full) for a closer look under the microscope, in the comfort of an armchair.

Spring comes to the coastal waters just like anywhere else, but it's not immediately obvious until you look really closely. As the spring plankton bloom progresses numerous small animals settle out of the plankton onto the shore, especially amongst the fronds of small red seaweeds that begin to grow now.

To go rockpooling in comfort, all you need is one of these - a binocular microscope with a zoom range between x7 and x45. It costs about as much as an entry level digital SLR camera and can provide hours of amusement.

Almost immediately I found these attached to the seaweed - tiny hydroids, waving their tentacles in the air, until the slightest tremor .....

... sent them into contractions

Then there were these minute mussels, translucent but beginning to acquire their darker pigment at their base, that were anchored to the seaweed after the mussel larvae had settled out of the plankton.

This little animal is an isopod crustacean, hard to spot amongst the seaweed fronds, but best of all there were ...

... loads of these little gammarid shrimps, beautifully pigmented to match the seaweed forest.

Their compound eyes are particularly striking, as are the highly reflected patches embedded in their exoskeleton

This tiny seaweed microcosm was home to about 20 of these gammarids, some of which had highly reflective, sparkly eyes. 

The exoskeleton is this one contained small reflective patches that looked like interior lighting and it had eyes that glowed.

Aside from the mussels, gammarids, hydroids and isopods I also saw a minute sea slug and a flatworm, as well as copepods. 

The photos aren't very good (they were taken by holding a pocket compact camera up against the eyepiece of the microscope) but they do illustrate the wealth of microscopic marine life that's present even on exposed shores, down at the bottom of the inshore marine food chain. And at this time of year it's the most comfortable way to go rock-pooling.

Spring-fruiting fungi

Thursday's Guardian County Diary is about scarlet elf cup fungus Sarcoscypha austriaca, a spring-fruiting fungus that seems to be having a very good season this year, judging from the number of photographs of it that are appearing on Twitter at the moment.

These two examples were amongst many opening on a south-facing embankment of the old railway line at Mickleton in Teesdale. It seems to thrive in this sunny spot, growing amongst a layer of fallen twigs, last year's nettle and hogweed stems and a carpet of moss. Many of the surrounding twigs were infected with green elf cup fungus Chlorosplenium aeruginascens, which stains the wood turquoise.

The scarlet cups are angled towards the sunlight and seem to act as parabolic reflectors, concentrating the sun's warm over their surface, where thousands of microscopic sporangia are embedded. When they're ripe they fire their spores out like pop-guns, shooting them into the airstream. In this example a small spider was taking advantage of the shelter and warmth.

Scarlet elf cup grows on rotting twigs. This example was about the size of a golf tee.

Green elf cup doesn't produce its infructescences very often, but the turquoise staining of wood that's infected with the fungus gives away its presence. Wood that's stained by the fungus has been used for decorative Tunbridge Ware

The other spring-fruiting fungus that sometimes appears locally, especially in the silty soil along some stretches of the river Wear in Weardale, is the morel Morchella esculenta, which is highly prized by gourmets. This is a young specimen ...

... but these two are probably past their best. Those convolutions in the cap fill with grit, so they need thorough washing before cooking. The peak time for morels here is at about the same time that butterbur leaves begin to expand. It has a long-standing reputation for appearing on sites where the ground has been burnt and old accounts say that in Germany woodlands were sometimes set on fire (illegally) to encourage its growth.

There are several species of Morchella here that are less common than the morel. I'm pretty sure this one is the semifree morel Morchella semilibera (formally known as Mitrophora libera) which has a disproportionately small cap.


A research paper published in 2010 (click here to view) provided some fascinating evidence that climate change was having an effect on spring-fruiting fungi in the UK and in north-west Europe, with milder winters leading to earlier appearance of these toadstools.