LIVING here in Wyre Forest district we have to think ourselves lucky at the volume, quality and variety of natural habitats that are available for us to enjoy.

We have wonderful heathlands, marshlands, and a variety of different woodland and grassland types, many of which are nationally scarce.

We also have some fantastic rivers and some spectacular and interesting pools but there is one set of habitats that we completely lack and these are the seashore and maritime ones.

To experience these we have to undertake a not to inconsiderable journey to the coast.

There are still a few relatively unspoilt stretches of coast relatively near to us and I always really enjoy any opportunity I have to visit them and discover new forms of wildlife I haven’t spotted before.

My most recent trip to the shore was with the Wyre Forest District Council’s Young Rangers group. It was even more of a pleasure to spend a few hours rock pooling with these youngsters as their enthusiasm for finding the strange creatures lurking in the rock pools was inspiring.

At some point many millions of years ago, relatives of all the land living animals will have evolved from maritime creatures, that began to exploit the bounty of opportunities that was on offer on dry land.

Fish crawled onto the shore and over millennia evolved slowly into amphibians and then to reptiles, mammals and birds.

Creatures with armoured skeletons and articulated limbs, the arthropods, evolved into insects and other creepy crawlies.

However, not all maritime creatures evolved into land-living or even fresh water species and living in our land-locked location it was these that really raised the curiosity in both myself and the Young Rangers.

In the sandy bottoms of the pools a little excavation soon un-earthed one of the many species of legged worms or Pseudopodia.

These strange and sometime large animals are highly energetic so getting a close look is difficult but when you do you are first taken in by their unexpected beauty as they are adorned with some spectacular colour, then you get a little shock as the beastie opens its mouth and inner mouth parts shoot forward. Larger pseudopodia can even dish out painful bites.

The most spectacular of all the finds was an animal known as a sea gooseberry.

I feel whoever named this animal was being most unkind as it is one of the most enchanting and beautiful animals I have ever seen.

Its body is, I suppose, the size and shape of a gooseberry or a large grape but here the similarity ends.

It is completely transparent with the same sort of shimmer you get from a fine crystal glass, then running longitudinally are ridges covered with fine beating cilia which propel this creature gracefully through the water.

The rhythmic beating of the cilia refract sun light similar to the way the scales on a butterflies wings refract light to give it fantastic and in some metallic colours.

Because the cilia are beating they cause wave after wave of different metallic colours to shimmer along the rows of cilia making this creature extremely beautiful and unlike anything else you are likely to find in nature and more like a creature from a sci-fi movie.