Steaming up beach-strewn cockles

THE other morning, walking the scoured sands of Courtmacsherry Bay after the storm, I came upon many full, fat cockles.

Ever the forager, I put three dozen in my hat – the only available receptacle – and took them home. That night, we would have shellfish tagliatelle. Food half for free! I kept my eyes open for cockles as I walked.

When they are fat and stranded, they catch the glint of the low sun or cast a crescent shadow easily seen. Later, inside them, I found creatures I’d never come upon before, pea crabs, the size of one’s small fingernail. They live their entire lives within the shells of the living cockles; at least, the female does. The male swims about. Upon finding an open cockle with a receptive hen inside, he dives through the open gape to fertilise her eggs. He may sit and wait until she does so, his cold, soft paramour beside him before he leaves her and travels on.

The crabs were not only a surprise but a touching sight when I saw them, nestled beside the cockles, their small, dead bodies shining in the kitchen light. Having been steamed within the cockles, they had changed to that vivid red that crustaceans do when they are steamed. The male had ten tiny yellow nodules on his coppery back and the female’s carapace was a startling blood-red, with translucent margins.

Their steaming was inadvertent and regrettable. To eat the cockles, we had to open them, and steaming them briefly was the most humane means we knew. As with the omelette and the eggs, one can’t make the seafood tagliatelle without opening the cockles. From the moment I met them, their fate was unsealed. Of course, the shell might have been broken open by an oystercatcher or a hammer-billed grey crow, and they would have met their demise just the same. I was just the first – or last – of the scavengers. The early oystercatcher catches the cockle. But perhaps so many had been washed up in the agitation of sand by sea and wind that the shore birds, already replete, had stopped feeding.

Higher up the estuary, the noxious green weed that has plagued the summer boats and beaches had mercifully been 75% swept away, ripped away from its moorings. One hopes its roots, also, were torn from the sand.

After the succulent cockles, I took a glass of wine and went to again review their crustacean companions in misadventure. I photographed them, partly in apology and partly in gratitude for their enhancement of my evening and enlargement of my mind. Having established what they were from a book on my shelves, I turned to the internet.

“This is the crab that can be seen swimming in estuaries over mussel beds.” a British Marine Life Study Society website kindly told me, “It the most active swimmer of all the British (and, I add, Irish) crabs. The female is quite different. She is almost twice the size of the male and usually yellow with a bright red blob on its soft shell. She is hardly able to crawl and cannot swim. She does not need to because she spends her whole life inside in a live mussel (or cockle) shell. The male fertilises her eggs by swimming inside the mussel when it opens to feed.” I assume there is some symbiotic relationship between crab and mollusc. I scratch your back, you scratch mine?

After the storm, yet more trees have slipped down the eroding clay slopes from the old wood above. The estuary broadens – rivers are always expanding their gullets, carving away their chins. But it is a great pity to see the beeches and alders lying dead.

In the wild weather, the seagulls sweep and soar and their cries are lost on the wind. The great northern divers float in small flotillas close to shore. Godwits, curlews, redshank and greenshank take to the fields. The little dunlin hunch their shoulders and hunker down in the salt marsh grasses on humps of ground that aren’t yet wet. The philibín or lapwing stands amidst comrades in tight knit bunches, their topknots flying in the blast.