Florida’s Living Beaches – A Guide for the Curious Beachcomber

Florida’s Living Beaches

The first book which should be in every beach goers bag is Florida’s Living Beaches: A Guide for the Curious Beachcomber, by Blair and Dawn Witherington. I’ve read this book from cover to cover several times, and often use it as my go-to resource for most everything I find at the beach. I own several copies myself, with one for each child to use anytime they wish.

When we go to the beach, we look for signs of life, in the waves, in the air, in the wet sand, and under the wet sand. We often take videos or photos of our findings using a waterproof camera/phone, which take great photos and video at the beach. When we get home, we search for our treasures in the book.

We often play off our children’s current studies in school. Ours are currently learning about the differences between living and non-living things. So for our past beach trip, we started with the question, “Is it living or non-living.” Then we could explore questions and observations from there.

Wanting to teach our children respect for life, we encourage our children to return things, especially living things, to the environment where we find them. It’s usually best not to touch things, but as part of our eternal quest for knowledge, we often gently hold some things to get a close observation before returning them to their home. For the Coquina Clams we found in the photo above, we quickly scanned the book until we saw shells. Then, we looked for the shells with the similar shape and found “Coquina Clams.” The book makes it easy to find things and each item in the book typically has an entire page of the subject, including 3-5 photos, map of where they are found in Florida, noted relatives, identifying features, habitat, and fun facts.

Florida’s Living Beaches is definitely on the must-buys for any Florida beach goer. Buy your copy today by clicking here: Florida’s Living Beaches: A Guide for the Curious Beachcomber. Blair and Dawn Witherington have really brought this valuable resource to life by writing this book. My recommendation is to purchase this book before you make the trip to the beach, so you will have a copy when you get here. Locally, you can occasionally find a copy at my favorite local bookstore in Seaside, Sundog Books, but being a quaint bookstore, they typically keep only one copy on the shelf.

Buy the book and get out and Explore30A and the world’s most beautiful beaches!