Читать книгу Seashore - Nick Baker - Страница 5

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, as well as a junction between both of these and the air. Add to all this the daily effects of the timetable of the tides and the seasons and you have quite a lot of ‘edges’, each bringing its own survival challenges for the creatures that live there.

To help you get straight to the most useful sections of the book, depending on whether your toes are sinking into soft sand or being prickled by barnacles, the seashore habitat is broken down still further – into rock pools, sandy shores, estuaries and cliffs. But do not restrict yourself to these sections as there are no hard and fast definitions of each. For example, the beach you are on may be predominantly covered in rocks but there may be sandy stretches. Or there could be an estuary at one end of the beach, so there will be some overlap between each of the different habitats and the things you can do there.

I don’t set out to tell you everything there is to know about this wonderful habitat. Not only would that be impossible, but just to get close would make the book so heavy you wouldn’t stand a chance of getting it in your beach bag! So Seashore simply aims to kick start you in the right direction, opening a door onto a very special, exciting habitat and a lifetime of exploring. Go and stick your head in a rock pool!

The muddy ooze of an estuary is far from dreary – it is full of surprises.

There is nothing like the nooks and crannies of a good rock pool.

Playing in the sand isn’t all about sandcastles.

A puffin enjoying his view!