Rare? You can spray that again

on cream in colour and the male is black and white... but I am merely a beachcomber not a biologist. Still, this encounter made me want to find more live critters. Watching BBC’s Spy in the Ocean, narrated by David Tennant, also inspired me to learn more about the back story of shells before they are just pretty objects in the sand. I searched – I peered in rock pools and snuck up with my bucket – all to no avail. But then I heard excited cries from a little family group near me at Pirates Cove. They were very

JOHN WRIGHT is a naturalist and forager who lives in rural West Dorset. He has written eight books, four of which were for River Cottage. He wrote the award-winning Forager’s Calendar and in 2021 his Spotter’s Guide to Countryside Mysteries was published.

There are few fungi as startling as the Giant Puffball.

They are bright white, vaguely spherical, upwards of football-sized and can appear in a field in large numbers.

I have seen 22 in a single bit of Dorset pasture, but a hundred is not unknown. As with most of the larger fungi, they happy to show me the soft shell brown crab they had just found.

Gemma told me they had found many that morning and her brother had even seen a few brittle stars scuttling about!

Further along the West Dorset coast I spotted a few fossils in the shingle. You really don’t need a hammer, for a lot of fossils are just lying on the ground. Once you get your eye in it’s just a matter of sitting and sifting.

I came home with a tiny ammonite gilded with iron pyrite, otherwise known as fool’s gold. Less glitzy but still fascinating was a belemnite, which looks like a bullet and used to be a squid like creature probably about 54 million years ago. Still mesmerised by the decoration on the butterflies’ wings I decided to use the tiny fossils and other sundry items I found on the beach to recreate its strange design. I couldn’t help wondering if native American Indians had based a lot of their designs on marbled white butterfly wings? n Jo is available for talks on beachcombing or sacred sites. Email josiebelasco@ gmail.com