Hester Loeff clearly doesn’t think much of tidying guru Marie Kondo. Her study is chock-full, you see objects standing, lying and hanging everywhere. Shells. A dried pipefish (a kind of elongated seahorse). Stuffed beach birds. Chests of drawers full of shells, sorted by type and shape. Shark teeth, ray eggs, a seal jaw.
And an enormous molar, from a woolly mammoth, found on the artificial beach of the Second Maasvlakte. “I still get goosebumps when I think back to that moment.” All kinds of cabinets with collections, skulls, stuffed and dried sea animals. Bird feathers, fish, starfish. Rarities, indeed. You could also call it a Wunderkammer. Loeff, with graying hair, cheerful eyes, has tried to furnish this space in her house in Zierikzee in the atmosphere of Charles Darwin’s office. Dark wood, jars with animals in strong water, microscope on the desk.
Loeff trained as an optician, but eight years ago she changed course. She went beachcombing, wandering, looking for special wash-ups on beaches. Several times a week. She organizes beach excursions. Is curator of the Royal Zeeuwsch Society of Sciences for the naturalia collection. And she has recently also started working as a ‘correspondent researcher’ for the Naturalis Biodiversity Center research institute, for which she collects samples of foraminifera, for example: single-celled sea animals with a calcareous skeleton, only clearly visible under a microscope.
“They have been around since the Cambrian,” she says, “half a billion years ago. Then look at what amazing shapes they have.” She shows enlarged images of various colors and shapes, from calyxes to spirals to stars. You can also find them on the beach, if you look hard enough, she says, although you have to put them under a microscope to see them properly. “If you can marvel at that, then you already have much more of a bond with nature. More respect, I think too.”
How do you go from being an optician to being a beachcomber? “What I do now is also make people look differently.” She uses her finds in combination with naturalia that she buys to create cabinets of curiosities, which she also sells. “Yes, it is a bit of a hobby that has gotten out of hand,” she says during the tour. “My husband and children no longer want to go to the beach with me because I take everything with me.”
Really curious
She collected the finds in this room in no more than eight years. “I really like the 18th and 19th century way of looking at things. That was the time of the Enlightenment, when people started to look at nature with real curiosity, and thus made all kinds of new discoveries.”
According to her, the core of that look is the capacity to wonder. “That is the way to perceive the world from feeling and curiosity.” This is how she also tries to look at the North Sea. “We often only look at what we can have from the sea, what we can get out of it, what we can earn from it.” She wants to do something in return.
Since this year, Loeff has been giving so-called sea lessons at primary schools. Then, for example, the children look at sand through a magnifying glass to see which shells and sea urchins are in it. And she goes to the beach with school classes. What kind of birds do you see? What can you find among the shells? “Children love using scoop nets in the water. Then they immediately see: hey, everything is alive here.”
We often only look at what we can earn from the sea
Hester Loeff beachcomber
Upon request, she immediately gives the reporter a sea lesson. On the extensive beach at Burgh-Haamstede, with a view of the Delta Works, a fifteen-minute drive from her house. It is one of her favorite free-range beaches, because so much different stuff washes up there. Also from different sand layers, which are regularly churned up by sand reclamations in the area, for example. You can sometimes find very old shells and fossils on this beach. “You can often recognize shells that have been in those old sand layers by a bluish color.”
She is especially a fan of spiral staircases: horns with a kind of porcelain wires that seem to run over them. Together we also find another horn, clearly a fossil because it is somewhat dull in color, of a species that no longer occurs here. “It is many millions of years old. And gives you a nice insight into what sea life looked like at the time.”
During the walk there are also a striking number of sepia shields, those white shields, often about fifteen centimeters in size, that people often hang up for the birds. In the spring it is the mating season of the sepia, a squid-like species, after which the males die en masse. In the months that follow, you will find shields of cuttlefish on the beach, she says. A little further along, a jellyfish just washed up. “There, it has long tentacles, look at those beautiful colors.”
Photo of Merlin Daleman
Black ivory
And then, just before we walk down the beach, the highlight. Loeff grabs something from the sand, near the breakwaters. Show it. Pride. A black, slightly curved, shiny piece, you could confuse it with washed-up wood. But upon closer inspection it turns out to be harder, different in texture and shape. “I think ivory!” She’s not sure, she’ll have to look at it under a microscope at home. “You see a bit of a line pattern here. In fact, all trunk bearers with tusks have that.” Suddenly enthusiastic: “I think a mammoth. Or a forest elephant, which once occurred here too. No, I think a southern mammoth. It was really bizarrely large, the ancestor of the woolly mammoth. The males could reach a height of 4.5 meters at the withers.”
At home she rinses the tusk and photographs it. She asks her online network of researchers what the piece of ivory could be, what animal exactly did it come from? The preliminary conclusion follows the same day by e-mail thanks to a mammoth paleontologist friend. A southern mammoth, probably. It goes straight into the collection.
Special The North Sea
The North Sea is an industrial estate. It is one of the busiest shipping routes in the world, a place for gas extraction, wind turbines, a recreational area, an important area for fishing. But it is also a nature reserve. At least 1,200 different species of animals and plants live there, from dolphins to octopus to humpback whales. In this special we explore what the North Sea does to us and vice versa.
Essay: the North Sea as a wing region
Fossils reveal the wild world that the North Sea once was
How is the marine life doing?
For these people, the North Sea is their backyard
Hester Loeff went from optician to beachcomber
Experience the North Sea with your senses
Photo’s: Merlin Daleman
Illustrations: Indra Bangaru
Newsletter NRC Science
Aware of small discoveries, wild theories, unexpected insights and everything in between
2023-09-21 16:00:56
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