Beachwatch comes to Studland

On Sunday, 16 September, BN member Stephen Allott agreed to help survey a small section of the naturist beach at Studland, Dorset as part of the Marine Conservation Society’s (MCS) annual Beachwatch weekend. The small group of volunteers were all BN members who also belong to www.inthebuff.co.uk . The weather was not that kind to us, as a beautiful sunny day on Saturday gave way to a blustery and cooler Sunday, making our task of getting the litter to stay in the bin-bags just a tad more difficult. We surveyed and removed litter from an area of approx. 90 by 50 metres, working from just above the tide-line to the sand dunes. High tide had passed at noon and we started the survey just over an hour later.

As regular readers will know, the beach at Studland is owned by the National Trust (NT). They were extremely helpful and arranged for one of their rangers (Terry) to meet the volunteers on the beach to provide us with safety gloves, bin- bags and litter pickers. Terry also returned to collect the bin-bags and equipment once we’d finished. The beach is obviously cleaned on a regular basis, as we found just a few handfuls of the sort of debris people often throw away or drop into the sand. The litter we picked included 20 plastic pieces (bottle tops, pen tops and similar items), 14 cigarette stubs, 24 wrappers/pieces of paper and ten ice-lolly sticks. We didn’t find anything unusual, although in the risk briefing given by Terry we’d been warned to be careful as there has been ordnance uncovered on occasion. We did come across what looked like an abandoned tent, but we left that for the rangers - it’s possible the occupants were out walking as we found no evidence that they’d been swept out to sea! Although not included in the survey results, we also cleared up some of the sand dunes area where we found about four times the amount of litter compared to the main beach area we’d surveyed.

My sincere thanks to Dave of SUN (Studland United Nudists) for his helpful advice, to Graham of the Somerset Strolling Bears for his support of this event (though we missed each other on the day) and to Emma Snowden of MCS for her unending enthusiasm and encouragement. I hope we can encourage more people to join in next year. Watch this space, sorry I mean beach!

Stephen Allott ( stephen@electromind.com )

Beachwatch started in 1993 and is the flagship event of the Marine Conservation Society’s (MCS) Adopt-a-Beach project. The results from Beachwatch are published each spring and used by MCS to campaign against the sources of beach litter at local, national and international levels. The data collected by Beachwatch volunteers contributes to a worldwide project, the International Coastal Clean-up, which takes place in over 80 countries worldwide. The Marine Conservation Society also works with the Project AWARE Foundation (International) to organsie underwater clean-up events.

See here for further information.