September 2024 Stone Collecting Trip –Part 25, Intriguing Discovery at Ward Beach, Wednesday 2 October

This morning I drove from Woodend near Christchurch to the small village of Ward in Marlborough. Ward is an hour south of Picton where I was scheduled to catch the Cook Strait ferry early the next morning. And just six kilometres east of Ward is Ward Beach. I spent just over two hours there before heading to the Flaxbourne Motels for the night.

I arrived at Ward Beach at 1.20 pm. The day was windy and cloudy, and the tide was low. From the carpark, I walked southwards to the mouth of the Flaxbourne River – at low flow but still attracting a whitebaiter. I then made my way north, back past the carpark. I was aiming to collect a wide range of stones, to help me to get to know the beach better, just as I did when I stopped here on my way south a month ago – see “Ward Beach Surprises, Monday 2 September”. Examples of tumbled Ward Beach stones that illustrate the main types to be found here are presented in the Series “Selection of Tumbled Ward Beach Stones”.

My intriguing discovery today is a five centimetre long stone that is not actually a good candidate for tumble polishing, but it has some really interesting tiny features. One side of the stone:

The other side of the stone:

This stone seems to me to be made up of lots and lots of tiny elongated crystals. However, it has been suggested by a couple of members of the “New Zealand Lapidary, Rocks, Minerals, Fossils” Facebook Group that these could be fossils instead, maybe sponge spicules or even barnacles. I will need to do some research on this issue sometime. I have tried to take some closer-up photos without a lot of success – these are the best I have done so far:

NOTE: 12 November 2024 – John Taylor, a rockhound and fossil enthusiast who lives in Scotland, visited me today and we discussed this stone. John looked closely at it under a magnifying glass and with a blacklight torch. The latter revealed some calcite present, and John thought the stone was most likely a shell fossil, probably of an oyster of some kind. The long thin features that had caught my eye are part of the shell material remaining after some erosion.

I kept my eye open for jaspers and found this small one with a lot of detail in it:

These two other small ones also caught my eye, the first having some hematite in it:

I found this brecciated stone, reminding me a bit of what is often called “storm jasper”:

Other finds that are brecciated or heavily veined:

This stone is perhaps a veined flint:

I am assuming the next stone is limestone, a very common stone type on Ward Beach. Limestone can be very plain, but the details in this one are fascinating:

There is also a faint trace fossil that can be seen on the first side of the stone above.

Two of my “plainer” limestone finds:

Maybe a limestone pebble with layers of lighter and darker sediment apparent:

I suspect this is also limestone, with some dendrites (dendrites are thin, branching crystals, often of some variety of manganese oxide or iron, that grow over a rock’s surface):

The following five finds are trace fossils in limestone, something I especially look for on Ward Beach:

See “W is for Ward Beach Zoophycos” for some more information on these trace fossil stones.

This rhyolite stone appeared here today – I’ve not seen one before on Ward Beach but then I haven’t especially been looking:

Finally, there are dark stones (flint?) with chalcedony (agate) veins that can be found on Ward Beach (see this Post on a 2022 fossick when I found one). I have seen them referred to as magpie agates, because of their black and white colour. This last find could be one of those:

Early the following morning I drove for an hour in heavy rain to Picton and caught a ferry across Cook Strait without any problem, arriving home in Whanganui that afternoon.

The Index to the Posts in this Series can be found here.