Tangled in Seaweed

This Wednesday past, a combination of wind and tides worked a magic wand over the beach here, and as far as the eye could see was nothing but a wide and flat, clean ribbon of beige, almost white sand. The trash buggy that trundles by two or three times a day never had occasion to stop and scoop up so much as a bottle cap.

But tide and wind are fickle, and the scene is quick to change. With the arrival of true autumn weather, the morning tide has shifted such that early morning walks have become impossible, or next to it, unless you have webbed feet or the stamina to trudge through loose unpacked sand for long distances. After lunch has now become the best time for good beach conditions, and I’ve adjusted my walking schedule to fit that hour.

Today I look out toward the beach as I am tying my shoelaces and see what looks to be a long unending smudge of seaweed browning the waterline. Before my feet ever touch sand, a strong salty tang of ocean and fish reaches me, growing stronger the closer I get. I haven’t seen the seaweed this abundant in weeks, and it doesn’t bode well for clean, trash-free walking. Sure enough, within minutes I spot the first gaudy splash of red plastic tangled in the wrack. The seaweed works like a broom to sweep rubbish in to the beach, and when considered, you have to say it is a good thing. Once the plastic is tossed up on land, it’s less risk to the ocean ecology, and easier for a regular patrolling trash collector to find. Certainly not pretty to see on the beach, but much of it will be picked up before washing out to sea again.

Old plastic bottles and waterlogged shoes aside, the ocean and sky today are outstanding, and bubbly tiaras of foam dance on the wave tops under a wide stretch of puffy clouds and cerulean sky. I stop for a few moments to look out and over the seaweed mess to the majesty of two blues above and below, and the twin whites of cloud and foam. I aim the camera but have doubts that any gadget can capture and hold this almost perfect combination of elements.

Something new in the tide these past few days, another deposit of seed pods, possibly from a faraway land. Like the seahearts, these smaller black mangrove (Avicennia germinans) pods have drifted on the currents to wash up on a Florida beach. They are a pretty diversion from the bottle caps and bits of plastic, and lay in olive green scatters around clumps of wet and glistening yellowish brown seaweed. I find a plastic cup that once held Cheerios, and rinsing it clean in the surf, use it to hold a collection of the green pods. By the time I have finished my walk I have what turns out to be a bowlful. Two of them I plant right away in the big white urn of geraniums outside my windows. A friend tells me she tried getting these pods to grow, but had little luck. Black mangrove naturally grows in coastal tidal areas throughout the tropics and subtropics of America and Africa. It grows marginally removed from the shoreline, where it can be reached only by high tides. Not exactly the conditions found in that white urn of geraniums outside my window, but…

Birds & Burger Beans

Walking on the beach this morning, I thought for a minute I had stumbled into a Hollywood remake of the old Alfred Hitchcock picture, The Birds. No sign of Tippi Hedren, but the birds were gathered in the thousands. Pelicans, gulls and egrets made up the largest part, with willets and plovers not far behind. The front edge of the surf, as well as the shallows was seething with more birds than I have ever seen at one time, stretching for a mile or more down the beach.

Obviously, such numbers of birds could only mean that a vast shoal of fish was there in the shallows just off the beach. Not being very knowledgeable about the local fish, I’m unable to put a name to them, but walking a few steps into the surf, the birds scattered and I could make out what looked like small pinkish baitfish. Didn’t much like the loud hungry squawks and hard eyes of the hovering birds, so I retreated quickly from their feeding ground.

The photo at the top doesn’t quite capture the squalling confusion of birds, but look closely and you will see that all of them, without exception are facing outward in what is a southeasterly direction. The total alignment of so many birds on both land and water intrigued me, but then it occurred to me that they were all facing away from the wind, a natural almost instinctive alignment.

The birds occupied a large part of my time walking, but something else was halving my attention. I have a great liking for a large, dark brown tropical seed that washes up on Florida beaches, and this is the best time of year to find them. Always hoping to find one, maybe two more of these treasures, I often poke through the occasional clump of washed-up seaweed looking for their familiar shape. Today, among all the birds and seaweed I found two more burger bean seahearts to enhance my collection. 

Seahearts are seeds carried to the ocean by freshwater streams and rivers, drifting on ocean currents, with many of them later washing up on faraway shores. These large round, slightly heart-shaped seeds are often called sea-beans and come from trees and vines that grow along tropical shores and rainforests all over the world. The seeds fall from their parent plant into waterways, such as the Amazon River, then drift through inlets to reach the ocean. They travel with ocean currents until they wash up on a beach perhaps thousands of miles from their origin. Seahearts are quite hard and buoyant, which helps them survive their long-distance voyage. They float because they have an internal air pocket trapped by a hard outer covering on the bean.

September and October are typically the most favorable times to find seahearts in Florida, where they are more commonly known as ‘hamburger beans.’ Along the eastern coast their presence on the beach is affected by a variety of conditions. Prevailing wind is important, with an east wind naturally blowing them westward toward Florida’s coast, where tides leave behind the drifting seeds tangled in seaweed. More often than not, seahearts are not the only thing caught up in the seaweed, but wash up along with driftwood, plastic bottles and caps, lumps of tar, and the occasional waterlogged sandal from Timbuktu. I didn’t know until recently, but this line of seaweed (and debris) at the tide line is called ‘wrack.’

The middle photo shows my small collection of seahearts, with a dime in the middle to give a sense of scale. The bottom photo is a cross section of the seaheart showing the air pocket that gives it buoyancy.