Strandline or litterline Tuesday 23rd September 2020

I have recently been asked  to look at  a number of litter issues along the coast, it's always disappointing to see litter washed up anywhere but especially on "our" coastline.

As regular readers will know I have blogged about this world wide problem often, but only when you look closely do you see the impacts made by marine bourn litter, especially of course, plastic in it's many guises.

Over, probably thousands of years man has dumped unwanted materials, of course it wasn't always plastic, but no matter what was dumped much is now incorporated into the geomorphology of the landscape, especially beaches, dunes and saltmarshes.

Driftwood is a natural stabiliser of the beaches and dunes, trapping, holding and allowing sand to form embryonic dunes quickly colonised by a range of "pioneer" plants, you only need to look at the recently exposed dune faces to see how man made items have also been doing the job of natural materials, making removing them very damaging.

I am often disheartened by the amount of plastic wrapped up in seaweeds often impossible to remove which means to remove the plastic then the seaweed must also go, depriving the beach of natural building materials and removing countless food sources for sand-hoppers and the like which in turn removes food for wading birds.

So lets look at the strandline, Collins dictionary gives this meaning, 

"a mark left by the high tide or a line of seaweed and other debris washed onto the beach by the tide"

So after the recent Autumn Equinox high tides the strandline is very visible with debris washed high up on the beaches and salt marshes along the coast, it will take sometime for the evidence of the tides to disappear, however as there was relatively calm weather at the time of the high tides much of the buoyant, unnatural, material was lifted from the beach and carried off shore, this will, sadly, undoubtedly reappear on a coast nearby in the future.

I have commented before that, mechanically cleaning beaches is incredibly destructive and any such action should be targeted and limited, there are no resort beaches in the county and thankfully we do not see mechanical cleaning any longer, better to appreciate the natural beauty and do what we can to remove and recycle as much man-made material as we can.

The natural detritus will decompose naturally and with help from sand hoppers and other detritivores munching on the decomposing vegetation, providing a huge feeding opportunity for the 1000's of wading birds, such as the Ringed Plover below (photo Colin Dalton) and gulls which visit our beaches for the winter.

KEEP SAFE