A white tray in the shade, and the bucket I gave up
In July the rocks fill up with families, buckets and nets, so I go early, before nine, when the tide is out and the pools are still in shadow. My method has become almost entirely about keeping still. I choose one pool, kneel on the side that keeps my shadow off the water, and wait five minutes by my watch before doing anything at all.
For the first minute the pool looks empty. Then the prawns appear, nearly transparent, given away mostly by their shadows on the sand and the fine stripes on their legs. A shanny comes out of a crack and props itself up on its fins to look at me, and a rock goby crosses the floor in short, jerky dashes. The long-spined sea scorpion in the weed at the side had been there the whole time; I only saw it when it moved its eyes.
The bucket habit ended last summer. I had put a shore crab and two prawns into a bucket of pool water and left it on the rock while I looked at the next pool along. Thirty-five minutes later my thermometer read 17 °C in the pool and 24 °C in the bucket. The prawns were lying on their sides and the crab barely moved when I touched it. They all went back and seemed to recover, but I have not carried a bucket since. A pool high on the shore can warm nearly as much on a still afternoon, but the animals living there chose it and can hide in the weed; a bucket in the sun gives them nowhere to go.
The routine now revolves around a shallow white tray that lives in the bag:
- Filled from the pool the animals came from, never from another one.
- Kept in the shade of a rock, with the water changed every ten minutes.
- Nothing kept in it for longer than a quarter of an hour.
- Everything returned to the edge of the same pool, slid in, never dropped.
The net has gone too. A net scrapes anemones off the rock and catches the fins of whatever it chases, while cupped hands and a clear plastic cup do the job more gently and teach you to move slowly. This morning’s tally from two pools: fourteen prawns, three shannies, one rock goby, the sea scorpion, and a crowd of beadlet anemones shut tight like red jelly sweets, waiting for the tide to come back.