Winter can be a lovely time for a walk on the beach. The summer crowds have gone and you may have the beach to yourself. Winter is usually a time of storms which often wash sand out and reform the beach, while depositing all sorts of interesting flotsam on the beach. But this year it has been very calm and by contrast sand has been building up and shells have been deposited on surf beaches.
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I hardly recognised the surf beach at Moruya South Head, with a large pool under the cliff, some rocks almost covered with sand and swathes of shells deposited near the high tide mark. The rocks now in the intertidal zone showed evidence of recent colonization with young limpets and blue periwinkles. The small rock crevices were filled with fast-growing green sea lettuce, Ulva sp.
With less human traffic, it is a chance to see what animal traffic has been leaving tracks across the beach. Along the back of the beach was a trail of a small animal with sharp claws that hopped along, probably a small marsupial. Several tracks of different birds traversed the soft sand.
There was some local seaweed washed up, mainly brown kelp (Ecklonia radiata) and crayweed (Phyllospora comosa) as well as some seagrass. Around the edges and underneath the clumps were small tracks and burrows of the sand hoppers that feed on the seaweed and in turn provide a meal for birds. A few old specimens of the cunjevoi sea squirt had been washed up and some giant cuttlefish shells (Sepia apama).
For anyone interested in shells, there was quite a feast washed up onto the beach shelf behind the main wave action. There were about 50 different types of small shells including limpets and abalone, as well as many snails and bivalves that burrow in the sand.
