Alana Bonnick Welcome
Marine biologist from Dartmouth in Devon, and just such an enlightening companion for a walk along the seaside.
People sometimes ask me – either in earnest or in mirth – what do you fill a magazine about walking with? Sometimes they stand back, eyebrows jumping, as if having tossed a particularly good firecracker into a hen house. Rather than pulling my where-do-I-begin face, from now on I’m going to hand them this edition – bursting as it is with marvellous creatures and wonderful people and beautiful curiosities and goosebumpraising sights – and say there, that’s what you fill a magazine about walking with.
A magazine about walking isn’t about walking any more than paintings are about emulsion or books are limited by being made from just 26 letters. Walking is about everything in the world – and enjoying, appreciating and understanding it all a bit more, using the most all-round capable (and wholly organic) exploratory computational device ever seen. One that grows in capability with every walk you throw at it. Seriously, if you’ve ever felt inclined to be impressed by a NASA Mars rover, take a more appreciative look in the big mirror in the bedroom. We’re amazing creatures, on an amazing planet filled with other amazing creatures, whirling through space, having our best thoughts, our best experiences, being our best selves and having our best chance of understanding what it all means when we walk. How can you not fill a magazine – and indeed a whole life – with that?
S ALANA LEVERS the slab of rock skywards, two blood-red eyes peer from the gloom.
A lapis blue pincer snaps at her hand like a pair of garden shears as she scoops the crustacean from its layer. It’s a devil crab: a reference to those diabolic eyes and thuggish reputation. “Stroke its shell,” says Alana, and I run a finger across its surprisingly soft carapace. “Those fine hairs give it its other name: the velvet swimming crab. It’s incredibly fast in the water thanks to its flattened, paddle-like rear legs.” There are around 65 species of crab in Britain and this is one of the most common. They’re easily found among the seaweed and rocks of the lower shore, says marine biologist Alana Bonnick, returning the crab and carefully lowering the rock.
I hadn’t expected so much heavy lifting as we walked onto the Devon shoreline at Dartmouth. “Rockpools are subject to huge changes over the course of the day,” explains Alana. “The temperature rises, and salinity changes if it rains. Creatures can be predated by gulls and they never know who else they’ll be trapped with when the tide goes out. The best thing is often to hide under the rocks.” Within a few minutes we’ve found edible brown and broad-clawed porcelain crabs whose camouflage and shallow profile makes
them almost invisible on a rock. We also discover eerily beautiful anemones, delicate baby sea urchin, and slabs of breadcrumb sponge – one of the largest multicellular organisms on the planet.
It’s proof you don’t need to travel to the Masai Mara, Brazil’s Pantanal or Borneo’s rainforest for a revelatory wildlife experience – the British coast can rival them all. We’ve got one of the longest coastlines in Europe: estimated at around 7500 miles, or over 19,000 miles if you include all the islands. And it’s remarkably wiggly (on the Hausdorff dimension scale it scores 1.24 – higher than Australia’s 1.13 or South Africa’s 1.02 but a way off Norway’s fjord-tastic 1.52).
And within those crenulations there’s an abundance of habitats from vertiginous sea cliffs that offer sanctuary to nesting sea birds such as guillemot, puffin and gannet; to saltmarshes,
mud flats and estuaries, home to avocet, dunlin and godwit. There are sand dunes, wildflower-strewn clifftops, and machair grasslands, a unique habitat only found in parts of Scotland and Ireland.
Few days out promise as much wildlife as a walk along the coastal path, but what goes on in the ocean feels largely hidden from view. Exploring a rocky beach at low tide is the best way to uncover its secrets and get up close to an array of alien species – and everything can change in just a few metres. “This is the upper shore on the intertidal zone,” explains Alana, as we head towards a narrow, rocky passage higher up the beach. “There’s not a lot of water during the day so anything that lives here has to be really hardy.”
Some of the most visible species are barnacles, which spend most of their life floating in the ocean as zooplankton until they pick up chemicals that attract them onto these rocks. “As they get closer to those pheromones they start developing this gluelike substance. They attach themselves headfirst onto the rock and they are there for life,” says Alana. Each barnacle is a hermaphrodite –both male and female – but it still needs to reproduce, which is a challenge when you can’t move. Nature’s solution? The largest penis relative to body size of any animal on the planet. “In human terms it would be almost a third of the height of Nelson’s Column,” says Alana.
Before we’ve had time to take in the enormity of that news, we’re on to limpets that grow around the intricate contours of the rock to create a water-tight seal, and jelly-like beadlet anemones, which pull an outer layer around themselves to retain moisture when the sea retreats. Once submerged at high tide, its stocky, crimson tentacles reappear, ready to sting passing prey. “They may look dormant but at high tide they are surprisingly mobile,” says Alana. “Limpets have to return to their ‘home scar’, but anemones can travel over half a mile in an hour depending on the terrain they have to cover.”
And on the seashore you can taste as well as see nature. All British seaweed is edible, Alana tells me, and there is a host of plants for aspiring foragers to discover. So before we leave the beach, we sample sulphurous rock samphire, surprisingly meaty pepper dulse and pungent sea cabbage.
But it’s the big and charismatic that we really want to spot. So later that morning we head a few
“...it’s the big and charismatic we really want to spot. We’re hoping to see seals, dolphins porpoise.” and
miles south to the lighthouse at Start Point to take in one of the most exposed and dramatic sections of the South West Coat Path. We’re hoping to see seals, dolphins and porpoise, but there’s also the promise of something more exotic. There are regular sightings of basking shark – the world’s second largest fish – from the cliffs along this part of the coast in summer. And British waters also host whales, orcas, and leatherback turtles that follow the Gulf Stream to feed on jellyfish. “We get sunfish as well: the heaviest bony fish in the world,” says Alana. “You can sometimes see them from the cliff top, with their fins slapping the water waiting for the birds to pick the parasites off them.”
As a marine ecologist she regularly sees pods of dolphin and porpoise. Britain has a surprising number of places to spot cetaceans with resident pods in locations like Cardigan Bay and Scotland’s Moray Firth. “We see lots of bottlenose dolphin coming here during the summer months,” says Alana. “One we called Nick-Nick, because of the markings on his dorsal fin. He would come right up alongside the boat and we noticed he was getting more and more scratches on him.” He suddenly vanished but the next summer his distinctive dorsal fin was spotted in Brittany. “There were a few reports of Nick-Nick getting feisty with divers,” says Alana. “Dolphin pods are matriarchal and we think he’d stepped out of line and been exiled.”
You don’t need a diving qualification to discover marine life. Head onto a sandy beach and the strandline of high tide debris can be a treasure trove, even in the midst of winter. The invertebrate-rich seaweed attracts birds and small mammals, but it also harbours seashells, cuttlefish bones and shark egg cases, known as mermaid’s purses. You may even find whale and dolphin bones and the skulls of marine birds.
The crescendo of activity you see in summer represents the pinnacle of an otherwise invisible oceanic food chain. Floating out at sea tiny phytoplankton rely on the sun for energy, just like plants on land. In summer they provide food for zooplankton, which feeds bigger species like sand eels, and in turn mackerel and bass. These all attract bigger predators like puffins, gannets, dolphin and grey seals, Britain’s largest native carnivore. And as we round the headland, we spot a pair. One of them seems to have fallen asleep, bobbing upright in the water, its eyes closed, head tilted toward the sun and its flippers held meditatively together, while the other dives playfully around the rocks.
Spotting seal pups in winter is one of the UK’s greatest wildlife experiences and top sites include Norfolk, Lincolnshire, the Orkneys and Northumberland. “When they are born they are covered in this thick downy white fur that gets easily waterlogged so they have to wait for that to shed before they can swim,” explains Alana. “For the first 30 days or so the mothers here leave them on a rock. Seal milk is one of the most high fat milks so the pups can grow to almost the same size as their mothers just on that.”
We follow a narrow path squeezed between managed farmland and the sea that proves a vibrant corridor for wildlife. Among the bracken and hedgerow we have seen at least ten species of butterfly, a host of bees and beetles; stone chats, white throats, yellow hammers and linnets. And we glimpse what we think is a cirl bunting, a species that has recovered from just 118 breeding pairs in 1989 to around 1000, with its stronghold on this part of Devon.
Our walk takes us down to Matterstone Sands, and in the shadow of two ancient shale stacks,
I dive into the water and float over forests of seaweed, to admire the shoals of silver fish darting below. And gazing back at the shore and cliffs above it’s easy to see why a coastal walk promises so much. Packed into a thumb’s width on an OS map is a startling array of habitats, crammed between sea and strandline, upper shore, cliff and hedgerowlined headland. Few wildlife experiences can compete for sheer variety and accessibility. No other kind of walk exposes you to so many turbulent and dynamic eco-systems in such a short space of time.
And here’s the best news. Wherever you live in the UK you are no more than 70 miles from the sea. Grab an ID book, pick a walk and rediscover your rock-pooling youth. You won’t be disappointed.