Dog Whelk – forty years ago in my nature notebooks

One of the greatest things you can have as a child is a love of the natural world. To have the capacity to find joy in a ladybird, to love the song of a bird or to appreciate a seed floating gently past on the wind is vital to a healthy outlook on life. Okay, in Orkney you can forget the gentle wind.

Forty years ago I was busy 12 year old keeping nature notebooks of everything I identified and some of the things that I didn’t. Here’s my entry for forty years ago today 11 August 1976:

On Westray’s beaches there are lots of Dog Whelk shells, and yes, they are very thick and some of them are toothed on the inside.

They have beautiful spiral sculpturing.