The Alternative Easter Egg Hunt!

With easter weekend promising to be a scorcher, you know it’s best to get out and about and wear your beasts (kids or dogs!) out for a hassle free Easter evening.

Harder said than done with the beasties filling up on chocolate all day, especially with so many smashing egg hunts happening around us in East Sussex and further afield. You can check out what’s going on in and around your area from the smashing folk at familiesonline.co.uk

One way my famalam will be tackling the choccy overload this Easter is to hunt for a different kind off egg. We’ve 3-year-old twin boys, so dinosaurs pretty much LIVE in our house and with Rottingdean beach a stones throw from our front door, we’re pretty lucky to have an abundance of dinosaur eggs (ie.rocks/pebbles) to hunt out and decide which old dino they’re from! But thanks to the amazing conservation work being done by the sharktrust.org, we’ll be hunting for ‘mermaids purses’ or shark and ray egg casings, recording our findings and joining the thousands of folk around the world becoming ‘Citizen Scientists’. 

“Empty egg cases can help indicate species presence and diversity. By recording your finds, you're helping us to discover more about egg laying species in our waters.” Sharks Trust

And whilst you’re down on your local beach #pickup10. One of the mighty fine local dad's in our area started a community group after the storm that rocked us back in 2014. On seeing all the rubbish that had been out at sea end up on our coastline, spurred him on to create a facebook page to get everyone living in the area to take a bag when you visit the beach and pick up 10 pieces of rubbish. If we all take part in keeping our beaches clean, this will not only make our wonderful local beaches cleaner and safer for us locals, but for the wildlife too. 

Cleaner beaches, cleaner seas, cleaner food.

A little jaunt down Rotters beach and we found: 

• 3 small spotted cat shark egg cases
• 1 undulated ray egg case
• 3 spotted ray egg cases

Not a bad little haul from our first hunt, so get yourselves out onto our beautiful shores and see what you can find amongst the seaweed. And thanks to the sharks trust, the casings were super easy to identify with their app, which you can download via the app or play store via the links.

You can learn about the different types of shark and ray egg cases found on beaches all over the UK, and see more about the hunt via the sharks trust youtube video below 🦈 

Happy Easter!