Cuttlefish bones and a man o’ war

Periodically, large numbers of cuttlefish bones wash up on Penrhos Beach, Newborough. Today was one of those days – the beach was covered with the oval shaped “bones”.

Some of the cuttlefish bones washed up on Penrhos Beach, Newborough

I’ve always thought that when large numbers of these “bones” wash up it’s because they’ve fallen off a boat that’s been catching / processing them. Apparently cuttlefishing is a big business in the English Channel. There, thousands of tonnes of these creatures are dredged up each year – 7,000 tonnes in 2017. Quite often, cuttlefish boxes from the boats also wash up here.

Cuttlefish box from Plymouth

Cuttlefish box from Brixham

Cuttlefishing by trawling is contentious. The Marine Conservation Society recommends avoiding eating cuttlefish caught that way (i.e. most cuttlefish in the UK).

However, it is also possible that when lots of cuttlefish bones wash up it is just a natural process. The creatures only live for a couple of years, dying after they have bred, and then their internal skeleton (the cuttlefish “bone”) might wash ashore after storms.

The BBC Science Focus magazine has a good article about cuttlefish generally.

Ironically, amongst the cuttlefish bones and debris washed up by the stormy seas was a bottle from Kraken Rum…

Also on Penrhos Beach today was a solo Portuguese Man o’ War (well, I only saw one anyway). It’s been a few years since I’ve seen Men o’ War here. Today’s was quite dull looking and probably a relatively long time dead.

Man o War 2017

Man o War 2023

Apparently the Portuguese Man o’ War can still sting even after it has been dead for days, some say even weeks later they can still sting. So it’s not something you’d want to bump into, tread on or pick up (nor your dog).

Remembering…the boardwalk

It’s ten years since work started on the boardwalk. And coming up to nine years since it slid into the sea.

The boardwalks from Newborough Forest to the beach, 2013

I tried to recreate the above picture, but the beach has eroded so much that the dune I stood on for the photo is long gone.

The stub of the boardwalk, 2022

Starting out from the main car park, things look very similar:

The start of the boardwalk in 2013

Start of the boardwalk 2022 – the emergency telephone has gone and the signage for accessible access has gone too (because it is definitely not accessible anymore).

Now, the boardwalk finishes where you can see the person on the skyline in the above picture. When it was first built, that was less than the halfway point.

The second half of the boardwalk 2013 – almost all of this is long gone now.

Building the boardwalk was always contentious; but it was nice while it lasted and was great for wheelchair accessibility and stunning views.

Burrowing bees emerging

This morning, some of the sand dunes at Newborough were buzzing. It sounded almost like there was a swarm of honeybees. In fact, it was the burrowing bees emerging.

Burrowing bees emerging from the dune face at Newborough. (They were hard to photograph, they moved so fast, but each yellow circle has at least one bee in it – there were probably more)

These bees will have spent the winter in tunnels in the dunes. The females toil away through the summer creating an underground system of tunnels and chambers, and then lay their eggs in them. Apparently most of these bees will have been laid last year and then developed underground through the winter. Some of them may have overwintered as adults.

A closer look at the freshly emerged bees – with one of their tunnel entrances showing at the upper right hand side

In previous years, these bees have suffered badly from Natural Resources Wales dune re-engineering works at Newborough: many of NRW’s major excavations have been in areas that used to provide nesting sites for the bees. The excavations would take place in the winter and all the hard work of the females, and all the potential bees of the following year, would be unceremoniously dug up and destroyed: something of a case of out of sight and out of mind.

Here’s another of this morning’s bees – aptly alongside a little forget-me-not flower.

(Incidentally, I’ve never known these bees to sting.)

After storm Ciara

Storm Ciara coincided with February’s full moon and spring tides. A lot of erosion has happened:

The route down to the beach alongside the (very truncated) boardwalk is no longer usable: it ends in a sheer drop of around six feet.

The sheer drop to the beach at the end of the boardwalk

Many more trees have been eaten by the sea.

Rapidly disappearing frontline trees

The main dune behind Penrhos Beach has been chopped right back leaving a very sheer sandcliff face once again, running the whole length of the beach.

The main littoral dune fronting onto Penrhos Beach has been chopped back by several metres in some places.

Even in the relatively sheltered area of Ro Bach the tide is pushing right up to the edge of the beach and tearing away lumps of grasses and spurge.

From above Ro Bach – it looks stunning and calm, but the waves are actually quite big and tearing away big chunks of the shoreline.

The highest tides are still to come, and strong winds are forecast for several days. But hopefully the worst is over and nature will begin to repair itself again.

Update 18th Feb 2020

The beach is already repairing itself.  All the chunks that were bitten into the shoreline of the Ro Bach area of the beach are now filling in with windblown sand.

Windblown sand filling in the erosion at the Ro Bach end of the beach

A closer look at the same thing: how quickly nature tries to repair itself.

And at the end of the boardwalk, the sheer drop has eased off a bit and people have already created a little traverse path to make your way down to the beach via (although, of course, you really shouldn’t do that because there is a footpath closed sign at the beginning of the boardwalk…)

The “new” (and unofficial) route down to the beach from the end of the boardwalk.

Just to note, the highest predicted tide for this spring is 11th March. (The same day will also have a super low tide.)

They shoot ravens, don’t they?

Winter is the best time to see ravens playing at Newborough, particularly along Penrhos Beach. Usually there will be between six and 12 pairs of them (they are always in pairs).  On windy days, they love to ride the winds that sweep up the dune faces.  They seem to play just for the fun of it. They will pick up sticks and pass them from their feet to their beak; or pass things between each other in flight. They drop things from a height and chase them, tumbling to the ground, only to pick the object up and do it over again. They cruise up and down the beach cronking and calling to each other – and they’ll cronk and call to you too, if you call to them.

A winter raven soaring above Traeth Penrhos. (I find photographing them very difficult – it’s almost always cold and windy, I struggle to keep the camera steady and they move fast.)

A pair of ravens preening and chatting with each other, Penrhos Beach

But this year, there are fewer ravens then I’ve ever seen before. I wonder where they’ve gone. And I wonder why they’ve gone.

And it’s hard not to wonder whether it has anything to do with the increased number of ravens that are being “legally” shot* (and once some are being legally shot, more are inevitably illegally shot – they’re considered quite a prize, because of their size). And perhaps it is also to do with the shrinking of the forest and increased disturbance. Who knows?

If you Google ravens and Newborough you will often see a figure of 2,000 being cited as the number of ravens that roost here. And claims of Newborough being the largest raven roost in Europe. But by 2004 there were only 800 birds reported to roost here. And it’s very hard to find a reliable and more up to date estimate than that.  I think there are far far fewer.  It’s hard too, to know how credible the estimates are when people post pictures of carrion crows (beach crows) and caption them as ravens…(and it is hard to tell them apart from a distance, especially if there’s nothing to give scale just the vast expanse of sand, or sea, or sky…)

A raven on the edge of Newborough Forest in the snowy winter of 2010 (or maybe it’s a crow…)

I hope the ravens aren’t abandoning Newborough: I wonder what that would foretell…

Never an organisation to let facts get in the way of fallacy, Natural Resources Wales continue to claim that Newborough has the “largest raven roost on earth”. . .

Update 2021
This winter (2020 to 2021) the area where the ravens would normally roost has been under near continuous work – removing trees (including those used by the ravens for roosting), widening paths, scraping away top soil – so this year there are even fewer ravens than ever:(

Nevertheless, NRW are still displaying a sign claiming that there is a “mega roost” of ravens here.

The sign near the area where there used to be a large raven roost

* see, for example, the BBC story about ravens being culled “in bid to protect livestock”; and NRW’s FAQ page about the licences; and the blog post by Rob Sheldon – Welsh Ravens: how many have been killed and why (and other posts he has about the killing of ravens throughout the UK)

Trialling treelessness…

Towards the end of last year, Natural Resources Wales gave notice that they planned to fell a four hectare block of the forest in order to establish an area in which to conduct “hydrological monitoring”. Off and on through the winter that clearfelling and site “preparation” work has been ongoing. The major works have now finished, the machines have left and the site has been fenced off…

The area clearfelled on the edge of the forest for hydrological monitoring.

NRW information sign for the hydrology trial site

The management of the forest is always a controversial issue and this trial is no exception…

The plan is for the area to be grazed: clearly that can’t happen for a while as the surface has been scraped and raked clear of all the vegetation that was there.  That is why the smart new fencing has been put around the area (to contain the future grazing animals), even though the forest is a designated open access area…

And then, in four years time, the area may or may not be planted with some scrubby/shrubby trees like rowans, hawthorns, hazels and birches.

Newborough Forest clearfell coupe April 2018

Icy sands and Eleanor’s bottles

Yesterday was a perfectly clear, sunny and bitingly cold day – perfect on Penrhos Beach. It was so cold that the dunes were frozen solid; the rock pools had a covering of ice; and there was a line of ice crystals all the way along the beach marking where the tide turned.

Tideline ice glinting in the morning sun. Penrhos Beach, Newborough

Ice crystals at the tideline

It was the first chance I’d had to visit the beach since storm Eleanor blew through last week. She has eaten into the dunes some more and exposed dozens and dozens of old(ish) bottles – and lots of other not so nice trash too.

A few of the bottles exposed by Storm Eleanor on Penrhos Beach, Newborough

Crab tide

Yesterday’s tide line on Penrhos beach comprised almost nothing but spiny spider crabs, hundreds, probably thousands of them. It looked like crabageddon.

Spiny spider crab shells

In fact, I am assured that these aren’t actually dead crabs, they are just the shells from the annual moult. Which explains why there were no birds taking any interest and no smells either. Somewhere out to sea there will be thousands of naked spiny spider crabs waiting for their new shells to grow.

I was puzzled how the crabs could manage to shed their shells, whilst seeming to leave the shells intact. How was that possible? Then it was explained to me that the shell can hinge open (hinging at the front) and the crab wriggles out the rear.  Once I knew that, I had to go and check it out for myself.

Here’s a freshly washed up crab shell. You can tell it’s empty by giving it a tap and it sounds hollow.

And, sure enough, if you lift the back edge of the shell, it easily opens up to show you the empty space inside:)

I also spotted this “jellied” crab…

 

 

The Athena goes into hiding

Earlier this year, the remains of the Athena were more exposed than they have been for a long time.

The wreck of the brig Athena in May 2016

But gradually the sand level on Penrhos beach has got higher and higher and now you’d be hard pressed to even spot where the Athena lies.

The Athena looking towards Llanddwyn May 2016

The Athena early October 2016

The last stubs of the Athena poking through the sand 25th October 2016

(Maybe she was fed up of being photographed so much!)