A limpet.

Not just any limpet, but one that has found a safe little berth on Runswick beach:

This limpet (Patella sp.) has found a depression in a rock, has over many tides hunkered himself down and made a home. This individual has chosen a risky place to live: it is high on the beach and spends a lot of time exposed to the beaks of limpets' predators (seagulls etc.) as the tide falls. But no gull has managed to lever this shell off the rock.

Jurassic mudstone cliffs, fossils, seaweed and...

These collapsing cliffs are the site of the old village of Runswick, which, in 1682, fell into the bay. You can see from the piles of loose fragments at the foot of the cliff that this an unstable place to be. Don't play here: bits of shale rain down constantly and every now and again a sandstone boulder (and the occasional village) falls onto the beach:

 

The loose rock at the foot of the cliffs can be a rich source of fossils but they aren't in great shape. I go there so you don't have to. Here's a belemnite guard:

 And a badly weathered and cracked Hilderocas ammonite:

Further away from the cliffs, entombed in the harder shale are many Inoceramus. Here's one well preserved occupant of the graveyard in the centre with a very weathered specimen to the left:

And away from the dead, the living. The green seaweed Enteromorpha sp., which I haven't seen on this part of the beach in 20 years:

Meanwhile, the faithful blogdog has something to add...

Fossils? Schmossils. I found a stick. Throw the stick!

Cormorants on a distant rock.

Sounds like the first draft of a Ted Hughes poem, but no...

These splendidly named Phalacrocorax carbo were digesting on rocks exposed at low tide. The right hand bird was spreading its wings, which, it used to be thought, was to dry their feathers. Maybe so: they do spend a lot of time in the sea and diving to catch fish on the seabed, but the principal effect is that the bird's large flight muscles generate heat and help heat up the North Sea temperature fish in their stomachs to speed up digestion.

A clifftop walk on a belated spring evening

While much of the magic here is on the beach with its fucus and fossils, every now and again the views and mammals get a look in. The blogdog and I went for a walk this sunset Sunday evening. The dog burst into a field and surprised a rabbit that hunkered down and waited for death:

 

As I was mulling over rabbit recipes, the dog instead noticed a stick and veered off, seizing the dead twig with idiot joy. Rabbit was off the menu:

Stick! Throw the stick!

The sun went down behind a distant hawthorn hedge...

 

Just throw the damn stick!

 

The near lunar lanscape of Kettleness glowed in the westering sun.

 Stuff the sunset! They happen every day. Throw the stick!

The moon was high, the sky blue, despite it being April the hawthorn wasn't yet in full leaf...

Who cares about the moon? Throw the damn stick! 

Somewhere on that ridge, around four thousand of years ago, a warrior was laid to rest in a long barrow. The barrow is long gone, ploughed out and reduced to a shadow in the soil visible only from the air.

Yeah, and in between warrioring he probably threw sticks for his dog, too.

I was half a second too slow to fully capture the pheasant that exploded from the grass:

THROW ME A GODDAMN STICK OR I'LL START DROWNING KITTENS! 

 And on the horizon, the setting sun caught the bridge of a ship in Tees Bay.

I give up. Look what you've done to me, I've started eating grass.

A dead juvenile porpoise (we think).

Thanks to regular reader Jude for these pics taken by her cousin Rachel asking what this creature, photographed on Runswick beach might be:

 

There was nothing to indicate scale except the gulls' feet but it looks like it has a small dorsal fin and the flat tail (much gnawed) of a marine mammal. More pics followed, a bit grisly:

We think it's a juvenile porpoise. We used to see them swimming in small pods a couple of miles offshore when sailing on James Cook.

Cuttlefish bone.

Lurking among the low tide rocks, the remains of a cuttlefish that has shuffled off this mortal coil...

The wonderfully named cuttlebone is made of aragonite, the same material that makes up the hard shells of limpets, whelks and long-extinct ammonites. The cuttlebone is chambered and the cuttlefish changes the gas/water ratio to adjust its buoyancy and so alter their depth in the sea. Cuttlefish are reported to be smart molluscs: they have the largest brain to body ratio of the invertebrates, a highly developed sense of sight and the ability to camouflage themselves using chromatophores (pigment cells) in their skin. They live for up to two years, feeding on crabs and fish and when under threat themselves emit clouds of sepia camouflage 'ink' which, unfortunately, makes them attractive for chefs and gourmands who feel pasta is incomplete without some cuttlefish juice. Each species of cuttlefish (there are estimated to be 120) has a unique cuttlebone. Here's this splendid piece of evolution close up:

Welcome whitbyseaanglers...

sorry you've been having a torrid winter to the extent that my grubbing around in the clay on Runswick beach has excited your interest, I hope the weather cheers up and the fishing picks up soon. I'm keen to hear about  interesting fish caught or found along this coast - please email me with anything interesting, be it fish, fossil or flotsam. My contact details are in the sidebar. Thanks will always be given, names named, photos attributed, Nobel prize money shared and if we're all stuck about what you've found or hooked, I have friends with bulgy heads who can help. Tight lines.

Shap granite and the sap rising in a wrack.

Seaweed covered in pustules means only one thing: it's the seaweed breeding season. This bit of Fucus vesiculosus (bladder wrack) landed next to an interesting artefact on the beach: an erratic. An erratic is a lump of rock that isn't part of the native geology. This piece of Shap granite was dragged here from the west coast by the glaciers in the last ice age.

And yes, I think the rock to the right contains fossil coral.

Run! A fiery ball in the sky!

Are the Gods angry with us? Have the angels been playing with matches? Has Kim Jong-un declared war on Yorkshire too?

Oh. No, sorry it's just the sun over Runswick Bay. We haven't seen it for 5 months. As you were.

In the Yorkshire Post: on why Easter is Yorkshire feast.

My Maundy Thursday Yorkshire Post piece on Yorkshire's role in setting the dates for the wandering feast of Easter for both the Western and Eastern Christian churches. This time I got a good show on the Yorkshire Post's website too:

To my esteemed Scottish readers, the headline isn't mine. Mine was 'E' is risen, by gum!'

Beach cart tracks...

In the 17 and 1800s Runswick beach would have been an industrious place. The alum industry, jet mining and even an iron smelting plant have all left their mark on the cliffs or, in this case, the beach. Supplies for the Kettleness alum works would have come in by boat: flat bottomed ships that would beach in shallow 'harbours' cut into the rocky beach. Horse-drawn carts would unload the barrels of supplies and take the finished alum fixative to market. Over the years the regular use cut grooves into the softer shale:

In the Yorkshire Post: review of Spillover by David Quammen.

My latest piece in the Yorkshire Post: a review of Spillover, about the science behind SARs, bird flu, AIDs, Lyme Disease, Ebola and a whole other pathogenic pantheon of diseases that 'spillover' from their animal hosts to humans.

Two honking great big Gryphaea (devil's toenail fossils).

(Edit: hello to all from Whitby Sea Anglers. A longer welcome here.) Another unpromising day on the beach, 30 mph face-freezing SE winds making the prospect of wet-handed naturalizing uninviting:

The beach is in its winter clothes: the incessant gales have scoured away the sand that makes the place so inviting to the summer hordes. As a result, things not usually seen by visitors are on display: shingle, rocks, bits of shipwreck and fossils. Here an ammonite counterpart that any sharp-eyed young fossiler would fall on delightedly...

 
And here, in the centre, a Gryphaea. The scouring tides have meant that a lots of these Jurassic oysters have come to light: they're usually a rare find of Runswick Bay beach.
  
However, a little further down the beach, find of the day. Two big Gryphaea, which appear to have died together. Overwhelmed by a mudslide, died of some unknown Gryphaeaic ailment or eaten, part digested and vomited back by a small icthyosaur? Who knows. But these two specimens are fine additions to the collection, photographed here in situ and compared to the other, more usual-sized Gryphaea that have been found as a result of this 'spring' weather and tides:

Periwinkle (Littorina littorea)

A common periwinkle surrounded by tubeworms (Pomatoceras triquiter), a couple of amphipods and a small Gibbula sp. lurking to the left.

The 'beast from the East' and a night fossil hunt.

Easterly winds, called the 'beast from the East' the BBC's weather presenters, have been roaring into Runswick Bay for four days now. You would not want to be out in yesterday's waves:

The winter gales have stripped all the sand off Runswick beach, exposing boulder clay washed from the fast-eroding cliffs, shingle and stones usually covered by the sand deposited on the upper beach in spring and summer.

So of course Number One Field Assistant (NOFA), being 9 and wildly enthusiastic about the exposed beach, proposed a fossiling trip. At night. In a gale. I, being 48, was less enthusiastic, but the with the Blogdog's casting vote in favour of going for walkies, off we went exploring the beach. And I'm glad we did. The highlights of our finds are below. Right, a Gryphaea, a jurassic oyster, around 180 million years old and to the left a piece of jet, found by torchlight on a jet black night.

It's been a good week for Gryphaea (also called Devil's Toenails), the last few days' haul is shown below.

So, Number One Field Assistant, Blogdog and I are off again. Face freezing easterly winds? Check. Snow flurries? Yep. But at least it's light, so mustn't grumble.

Reintroducing Smiggy the blogdog

One of the casualties of Google deleting 5 years of this blog's photos was the loss of the handsome hound that accompanies us on most trips to the beach, hurtling round the beach and mangling laminaria stems. Seen here on Lingrow Cliff with Kettleness in the background.

Smiggy came from Whitby Dog Rescue. Pop over and donate to this fine organization.

Hail on bladderwrack and a belemnite graveyard.

Not a promising day for a trip to the beach - the undercliff was an endearing mix of snow and mud. The white stuff was even lying on the beach. Snow on Fucus vesiculosus:

At first it seemed a barren day. The snowy shingle made it hard to pick out any fossils but after a while I got my eye in and spotted a heavily weathered belemnite:

And, lying in plain view a nice fat little 3d brachiopod which are a rarity here in Runswick, but ten a penny in the shale of Whitby East Cliff:

 

A lovely Cleviceras...

And a section of belemnite graveyard that had come down in a recent cliff-fall.

The bay today: Kettleness in the snow.

Lichen, an erratic and a fossil.

Out again with the young field assistant, who wanted to know why the beach had 'gone'. Ever tried explaining tides to a 2 year old? So in the absence of sand, we looked at lichen:

A closer look at the rock showed something distinctly fossil-esque, at the lower right of the following pic (and slightly out of focus, as the field assistant was tugging at my leg at the time which is hardly conducive to good macro photography):

Not like anything I've seen in the Jurassic shales and sandstones hereabouts. The rock is from the boulderclay undercliff which is a remnant of the last ice age. The boulder is probably an 'erratic', picked up from the west coast of England and dumped here when the glaciers melted. West coast rocks are far earlier in the geological sequence than our mere 190 million year old cliffs and scars. Off to the Natural History Museum field guides to see what it might be.

Runswick blogger in the media...

with a pre-Christmas article in The Guardian (nothing to do with natural history). And coming up soon, a feature in The Yorkshire Post which is about natural history red in tooth and viral claw.

Kettleness breakers

on a bright December morning.