Calshot!

On the 20th February, I went on a school residential trip to Calshot activities centre, which is on a spit (a little bit of land sticking out from the coastline). It's in between the Solent, and Southampton, and there were loads of activities to do there. I know this isn't the Chilterns, but I thought you would like to know about some of the brilliant wildlife we found there.

On the 3rd day there, we went trawling, and caught lots of amazing things. Our favourite was a Sea Hare, (which is a slug-like blob), which we called Blobby! He looked just like a strawberry, as he was red with white spots, and we learnt that the colour they are depends on the colour of the seaweed they eat.

Blobby!

Blobby's ink on my hand!

We also caught a huge starfish, which was way bigger than any others I've ever seen. I managed to get a picture of it compared to my hand, and it was nearly double the size!

Those little spidery things round the outside are called spider crabs, and we got lots of them! They looked just like spiders (hence the name). There was a thing called a Sea Squirt, which is a small blobby thing stuck to a rock, but it looked a lot different to blobby.

Sea Squirt

There was even a sea urchin! I got to hold it, and I nearly dropped it as it was very sharp and spiky.

Blobby (left), Sea Urchin (middle), Spider Crab (right)

We also did a thing called Beach Bonanza, which was basically rockpooling. We wandered along the beach in groups and found as many different types of living things as we could. All groups found lots of starfish, snails, seaweed, and my team even found a sea lemon, which was really cute!

The Sea Lemon - so cute in real life!

A clam shell (alive)

There was an amazing view out of the window from the room I was in. It looked out over the sea, and it was really cool to see all the huge ships go by. One night, there was even a cruise ship, it was massive, and as the night sky was pitch black you could see all the lights coming from the windows. Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture of it.

View out the window