THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 26, 1996 TAG: 9605230213
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 08 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY CHRIS KIDDER
CORRESPONDENT
LENGTH: 130 lines
WHEN I WAS younger, I believed I'd been a whale or a porpoise in another life. I walked the beach with my eyes fixed on the water, fighting the urge to wade out beyond the breakers, certain that if I did, the sea would take me to my other home.
I still feel a pang of homesickness when dolphins thread their way along the shore, but my attention has been captured by terra firma, my memories lightened by the bits of sea that wash up on the sand at my feet.
Everyone who walks the beach has his or her own special reason. But few, if any, of us can take that walk without finding something we wish to keep. It might be a purple coquina shell splashed with yellow and tiny enough to fit on the tip of a child's finger. Or a giant cockle large enough to hold a serving of soup. There might be a piece of pale sea glass, a pearly jingle shell or the perfect calico scallop.
Beachcombing. It may be the one perfect sport: exercise and relaxation rolled into one activity. No lessons, special equipment, fees or permits required.
North Carolina's Outer Banks beaches hold a trove of treasures that fit in a pocket or a hat. These gifts from the sea are yours for the taking.
While many local beachcombers favor sea glass - bits of bottles and other glass sanded to a fine frost - visitors often prefer seashells. Seashells are the skeletons of mollusks, marine invertebrates that include more than 100,000 species.
While there are seven classes of the phylum Mollusca, we're most familiar with the bivalves and gastropods (univalves.) They produce the seashells we collect from calcium carbonate; their individual shape and color determined by the species.
The shells of bivalves - oysters and several species of scallops, cockles and clams - are the most common found on the Outer Banks. Lightning, channel and knobbed whelks and moon snails are frequent gastropod finds. Blue and ribbed mussel and jingle shells, which are bivalves, and slipper shells, which are gastropods, are also common.
Other popular beach treasures are sand dollars and sea stars. Both are echinoderms, a phylum of marine creatures including sea urchins, characterized by internal skeletons and textured skin often covered with spines.
The sea stars, often called starfish, that are found on the Outer Banks are generally small - no larger than the palm of your hand. They are carnivores; like humans, they enjoy a good clam or oyster.
Sand dollars come in a variety of species. Most common on our beaches is the keyhole urchin: in addition to its signature five-petaled decoration, the shell has five ``keyholes.'' The skeleton of sand dollars and other sea urchins is called a ``test,'' from the Latin word testa meaning ``shell.''
When alive and covered with their fine fuzz of spines, sand dollars come in several colors. They are bleached white by the sun after the organism dies.
Terri Hathaway, director of educational programs for the North Carolina Aquarium at Roanoke Island, has been collecting shells from Outer Banks beaches for years. Like a true beachcomber, she is always interested in the rare or unusual item that finds its way to our shore.
Hathaway enthusiastically relates the details of heart urchins, closely related to sand dollars, coming ashore this past winter. Some were 5 inches or more across, she says. And a few years ago, after a winter storm, two paper nautilus shells were found on the beach. One, she remembers, was found at Coquina Beach. ``They're so fragile,'' she said. She was still amazed that it traveled so far, in such rough weather, and arrived unscathed.
Some shells are rare in this locale and others harder to find, but Hathaway says that none found on the Outer Banks is an endangered species. The overall number of shells washed up on the beach has remained roughly the same over the years, she said. ``Now you just have to share them with more people.''
Although locals often have their preferred beaches and favored times of the day or year for beachcombing, most will tell you that there are no hard-and-fast rules. I found a near-perfect, 3-inch sand dollar a few years back on one of the busiest stretches of beach in Nags Head in the middle of summer.
Your chances of finding something rare is better in winter, because winter storms usually do a better job of churning up shell beds and moving shells inshore from distant waters. There are also fewer people on the beach during the colder seasons, increasing your chances of being the one to find something special.
Beaches south of Cape Hatteras (Frisco to Ocracoke) are best for shelling, because they slope more gently than those north of the cape. Wave action on steeper beaches tends to break shells up, Hathaway said.
Shells can also be found on soundside beaches. Many local mollusks spend their lives in the sound. The shells of oysters, for example, end up on the oceanside only after the oyster has died or been eaten.
Beachcombers are usually advised to walk the beach at low tide. Walking is easier on the firm foreshore. But if you get to the beach really early, there are often good finds along the high-tide line.
My personal preference is to walk the beach just as the tide is changing, walking in one direction as it reaches its lowest point and coming back as it starts to rise. Each successive wave brings gifts, their colors and shapes made beautiful by the sea. I am dumbstruck by even the most common clamshell when it is laid at my feet, sparkling and reborn as an artifact of an island dream.
I keep a bowl of small shells in my office. I use them like worry stones. They sift through my fingers and I hear shells in the surf. I touch their chalky curves; the fine grit of sand feels like a beach. And when the sun warms these fragments of memory, the scent of the sea wafts ever so lightly across my desk.
Without them I would run aground, be landlocked, left high and dry. It would never do. ILLUSTRATION: Staff photo by DREW C. WILSON
Terry Kirby Hathaway, education curator at the North Carolina
Aquarium on Roanoke Island, holds a Naked Sea Butterfly, a mollusk
found on an Ocracoke beach.
SHELLING
You don't need to know the identity of beach treasures to enjoy
their beauty or recall why and where these bits of the beach found
their way into your hand. But if the ``how'' or ``what'' is
important, it is easy enough to find out.
There are dozens of good reference books available at local
bookstores, including Peter Meyer's ``Nature Guide to the Carolina
Coast'' (paperback, $13.95, illustrated, color photographs), ``The
Seaside Naturalist'' by Deborah Coulombe (paperback, $15,
illustrated) and Petersen's Field Guide to the Atlantic Seashore
(paperback, $16.95, illustrated).
Staff at the Cape Hatteras National Seashore or the North
Carolina Aquarium on Roanoke Island are also available to help you
identify your beach finds.
This summer, you can learn about seashore collecting in the
following free programs:
Beachcombing Biology: North Carolina Aquarium, Fridays at 1 p.m.
Beach Walk at Cape Hatteras National Seashore:
- at the Cape Hatteras Visitor Center, Buxton, Thursdays, 9 a.m.
- at the Coquina Beach parking lot, Bodie Island, Thursdays, 8
a.m.
- at the Ocracoke Island National Park Service Campground,
Wednesdays, 8:30 a.m. by CNB