Class 4 had an excellent afternoon today, looking at Braunton Burrows in great detail!
You normally talk about the burrows from the sea back towards the land but we approached from the car park, so we ended up doing the whole thing backwards… never mind, it all still made sense as we walked through.
Wonder if you can work out the features from the photos?
Embryo dunes – ok, we didn’t see any of these. We did however see a great You Tube video of how Crow Point is at the point of becoming less of an island than it already is…
Fore dunes – these are at the very front of the dunes facing the sea. It’s a harsh habitat that’s beaten by the wind and has a high alkali content sue to the salt spray.
Yellow dunes – named for the amount of sand you can see within them. A harsh environment still and susceptible to movement. ‘Big Dune’ (as it was once named) lost its hold of it vegetation and slowly became blown out. We weren’t around this one today but there are photos and vantage points that show it’s moving at quite some pace!
Slacks – where you’ll find the occasional (and not allowed) tent and fire pit. Slacks are made from the leeward protection of the dunes and provides a flat,sometimes flooded area. It can be rich of nutrients and the slacks we’ve seen by the Golf Club are rich with different flowers – we think the water levels are lower there and they get more chance than the drier and quite barren slacks we visited today.
Grey dunes – these have quite established plant life on them, supporting a variety of animal and insect life. It’s called a grey dune due to the amount of compost material hiding the evidence of a sandy soil. It’s getting less alkali as you get away from the salt spray.
Then there’s the scrub area – PH levels are getting back to normal and larger shrubs and trees take over.
… and of course, those magical trees close to the car park, decorated with poo bags.
The children also said there were Dog Poo Fairies that carried these dog poo bags away in the evening, but looking at the state of them, I don’t think so.
So apart from adders, dog poo was also on our Risk Assessment for the day. We didn’t see an adder, but we saw hundreds of bags lying around, some ripped open, some flat but all of them not within their owner’s bins 🙁
Dog poo is toxic and can be harmful to humans.
Dog poo also changes the chemical balance of the burrows and the wardens have noted a change in the plant life as a result 🙁
At the end of the boardwalk, we did a #2minutebeachclean 
We limited the children to 1 piece of plastic each but even with less than 100 metres we could have collected 5 pieces each. Some lovely children did just that – and we brought them home to bin there instead. Some planned how to recycle theirs on the walk back.