The Shell Fairy – Collecting Seashells for Others

It’s still dark and Kathy Eil is getting ready for her daily bike ride to the beach. That’s the kind of dedication it takes to be Marco Island’s shell fairy.

“It started off that people would call me the shell fairy,” Kathy Eil laughs. It must have been eight to 10 years ago. I was putting my shells out on the railing at Marriott’s Crystal Shores and this man came up to me and he said, ‘Are you the lady who puts the shells out every day?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘I’m not telling my kids. They think there’s a shell fairy that puts those shells on the railing just for them every morning.’ I started crying. I said, ’That is so cute.’”

Over the years Eil has become known as the shell lady to people who have discovered that she places seashells she finds most every morning on the railing of the beach access at the City South Beach Access, next door to Marriott’s Crystal Shores resort. Eil doesn’t like the image that the term shell lady may conjure up.

"Stephen and Debbie Barker of the Marco Review started mentioning my shells on their website,” Eil said. "But instead of calling me the shell fairy, they called me the shell lady. I told Debbie, ‘I don’t want to be the shell lady. It sounds like I should have on this big overcoat with 15 cats following me down the sidewalk. I don’t like the way that sounds. So, it’s been the shell lady ever since. I have a few old friends who knew me as the shell fairy, and they still call me that. For everybody else, it’s the shell lady.”

For Eil, shell collecting is a tradition that has been handed down through the generations.

“As a child we lived in Wisconsin,” Eil recalls, "but every Christmas and every Easter we would visit my grandmother in Ft. Lauderdale. My grandmother taught my mother everything she knew about shelling. Then my mother taught me everything she knew about shelling. So, it’s a whole family tradition of shellers. When my mom passed, us kids split up her shell collection. They are extremely precious to me. Now my eight-year-old granddaughter is huge into shelling. Every time she comes to visit, we have to immediately get up at 5:00 AM and go to the beach and look for shells.”

When Eil moved to the island, she found the shells to be completely different than the shells she and her mother and grandmother used to find on the east coast.

"I started collecting shells as a kid,” she said. "My grandma, my mom, and I would go out together to the beach in Ft. Lauderdale. Then they moved up to Pompano and we’d shell there. Then we bought here and I started coming out here. It’s interesting, the shells on the east side are much different than the shells on the Gulf side. So, I had to learn all about the shells that are on the Gulf side. So, it was a bit of a learning process to catch up. They were just totally different shells, so I had to get a book. So, this friend of mine said, ‘You’ve got to buy this book, it’s called Florida’s Fabulous Shells. You’ll find everything on the Gulf side in that book.’ Which is exactly what happened. So, every time I found a shell that I liked, I’d have to look it up and see what its name was and all that stuff. Now I’ve got it down. But every now and then I find one that I don’t know what it is. They’re not native to the Gulf side, and they just show up. It’s like, ‘okay, where do they come from? If only they could talk!’ I find shells that are native to the Gulf, but they’re only found in 10,000 feet of water. So how do they get on our beach? You just want to talk to them and say, ’Tell me your back story. How did you get here?’”

The first time Eil stepped on Marco Beach she found the shell that it seems all shell collectors covet, the junonia.

“The morning that my mother passed away,” Eil said, "I said to my husband Mitch, ‘I’m just going to go out and walk the beach a little bit and think about mom.’  So, I get out there and unbeknownst to me, overnight there’s been this huge tidal wave that’s come in and just covered the beach a foot deep in shells. I walked off of the boardwalk at Stilts restaurant, and right in front of me was a full, perfect junonia. I said, ’Thank you, mom.' And I didn’t know what it was. I just thought, ’That’s the prettiest shell I’ve ever seen.’ This crippled old lady came up to me and said, ‘You’ve got yourself a junonia. Beginner’s luck. You’ll never find another one.’ Well, I’ve found 17 now.”

“It was the very first time I stepped foot on Marco Beach,” Eil said, shaking her head. "That’s a little too much synchronicity to ignore. So, then I felt like, ‘I really do need to go out there every day.’ All of my junonias have stories, and I know each one like deceased pets or something,” she laughs.

"So, Sanibel, eat your heart out,” Eil said. "We have just as good of shelling, or better.”

Sanibel has a reputation for excellent shelling. Eil bristles when told of the book, Florida’s Seashells, by Blair and Dawn Witherington, that claims that on Sanibel “roughly one junonia per day is found."

“Oh, that’s ridiculous,” Eil said, “that is ridiculous.”

Eil cautions novice shellers to avoid the junonia trap.

“Don’t go looking for junonias and ignore everything else,” she laughs. "Your chances of finding a junonia are pretty slim. I’ve got friends who’ve lived here 20 years and don’t shell as much as I do, but they’ve never found a junonia. So don’t go out there because the guy at the front desk at the Marriott said, ‘If you go out there, look for a junonia. This is what they look like. They’re the best shell we have.' There are so many other gorgeous shells out there that aren’t junonias.”

Eil’s work as the shell fairy has been wonderful for her.

“It’s been the most wonderful way to meet people,” Eil said. “Most people are like, ‘Oh, you put these out, and we can just take some! I’m going to take some for my mom because she can’t walk in the sand anymore.’ Or ‘I’m going to take some home to the grandkids.’ Or ’tell me what the names of these are, so I can I try to learn about shells, too.’ So, we get this Shells 101 thing going on. Or sometimes, I give them away on the beach. Just yesterday I found two spiked jewel boxes that were still hinged, and they were bright purple inside. I ran across this family who were here for Thanksgiving. They were here with twin four-year-old daughters. So, I walked up to the parents and said, ‘Could I add these to your daughters’ collection?’  The father said, ’These are the nicest shells we’ve found since we’ve been here! What do you say girls? Say thank you!’ Stuff like that will happen. Real positive.”

Eil said the key to successful shell collecting is getting to the beach by sunrise on a low tide.

“For one thing,” Eil said, "the sunrises here are as good as the sunsets many, many times. But low tide is usually between sunrise and 7:30 AM. That’s when it’s the lowest tide. You want the morning low tide. The second low tide of the day, you’re not going to find anything.”

She said shelling on Marco is seasonal.

"In the summer,” she said, "most of our storms come from the east. You’re not going to find any shells. It’s seasonal. People get so upset in the summer when they’re walking the beach and don’t find any shells. It’s the wrong time of year. In the winter, storms come from the west, northwest, northeast. The waves are bigger and the shells will come in. If we have a really big storm that comes in from the west, generally it’s two days after that storm that the shells come in. I don’t know why that is. But I don’t ever take a chance. I go out the day after the storm, the day after that, and the day after that - just in case.”

Eil said there are definitely hot spots on the beach for shelling.

"The beach is C-shaped,” she said, shaping her hand like the letter. "So just naturally the shells seem to congregate between Crystal Shores to Royal Seafarer or Summit House. That’s where you’re going to find the most shells.”

But like everything in nature, there are exceptions.

“I have found junonias at Cape Marco,” she said. "I have found junonias at Tigertail. And I have found junonias square in front of the Marriott, and square in front of the Hilton.”

She said once a spot is hot, it usually stays hot.

“Usually,” she said, "if the season starts out where you’re finding good shells in one spot, it’s the sweet spot, and it’ll be like that all winter. That’s where they’ll come in. If you’re a young person, you could start at Crystal Shores and run all the way to the Madeira and start looking. I can’t get there as fast as I used to. That would be a good place to start and go south. Or you can start at Residents’ Beach and go south. I kind of keep an eye on the weather. If the weather is coming in from the west, or the northwest or the northeast, and the waves are big, then the shells are going to be really good two days later. So, I’ll go out then. I’ve figured that out over the years. But I don’t necessarily go out every day anymore, I just can’t do it.”

Health challenges have made her daily expeditions challenging.

“One of the things that has changed over the past couple of years is that I have developed autoimmune disorders,” Eil said. "And one of them is rheumatoid arthritis, and it’s decided it’s most happy in my feet. So, walking has become a real problem. I used to walk all the way from Crystal Shores to Hideaway and back. Now if I can get to Residents’ Beach and back, it’s a miracle.”

But shell collecting is just part of the reason Eil enjoys visiting the beach. She is part of a loosely formed network of beach friends.

"There’s a whole group of us who have gotten to be friends over the years,” Eil said. "We’re all very dedicated early risers. We’re all out on the beach and we’ve all gotten to know each other over the years. Some of them are shellers, like I am. Some aren’t. My husband Mitch always goes on Saturdays, because there are certain beach friends who he particularly likes who only go on Saturdays. So, he’ll get out, and if we run into them, he’s so happy. I have friends who are Canadian and Norwegian that haven’t been able to come because of the pandemic. All total, if they were all here, and life was perfect, there would probably be around 30 of us. We’ve all just gotten to know each other over the years. Every year we have someone who dies and we have somebody new who comes in. We just got a new person who lives just a block away. He’s from Eastern India. He’s absolutely an early morning beach walker. He could care less about shells. But we’ve all gotten to know one another because we can see each other’s faces on the beach every morning. He’s kind of a new one. We had a retired neurological surgeon from Cape Marco, we called him Doctor Bob. He just died a week ago. Very unexpectedly. So, we kind of keep it the same number of people.”

Mitch is very supportive of his wife’s efforts. 

"The Dews,” Mitch said, "that’s what they call each other.”

"The dedicated early walkers,” Kathy interjects, "the Dews. 

"That’s still one of her email addresses,” Mitch says with a smile.

"We don’t call ourselves that anymore,” Kathy laughs.

Kathy Eil has a relatively small shell collection at home. Mitch helped her see the light years ago.

“My collection got pretty big,” she said. "Mitch said, ‘We’re either going to have to build a bigger house, or you’re going to have to start giving them away,” she said with a laugh.

“I said, ’That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to give them away!’”

And that is how the legend of the shell fairy was born.

“This was the origin of her beautiful thing where she meets people at the ramp,” Mitch said. "She realizes she has enough. Occasionally there will be one that breaks through into her collection, but she realizes these are really valuable, she enjoys collecting, so she spreads the love.”

“I’ve added two to my collection so far this season,” Eil said. "I have to take something out to put something new in. If I find one that’s nicer than one I already have, I switch ‘em out and put the other one on the rail."

Eil is ecstatic that her granddaughter, who will be visiting soon, shares her love for shelling.

 “She has a much better eye than I do,” Eil said humbly.

“I find that hard to believe,” Mitch jokes.

“She sees better and she’s closer to the ground,” Kathy laughs.

 “Her eyesight is incredible,” Mitch said of his wife. "She’s like an eagle. There’s 10,000 shells there and she’ll beeline to the perfect shell. She’s the same way with jigsaw puzzles.”

There is an adage that one develops an eye for spotting shells. Kathy Eil says it’s true.

"An older friend who’s in our group is named John,” she said, "he’s from Wisconsin. He is also a very avid sheller. He stays at Eagle’s Nest. He said, ‘You train your eye. It’s for color, or it’s for shape. So, you can see a little shape sticking out of the sand, and you know it’s a shark eye. You just have to find out if it’s broken or not. Or you see orange, and it might be a horse conch. Then you just have to get down and see if it’s in one piece or not.’ Your eyes absolutely become trained to spot shells. Mitch has seen me look at just a whole plethora of shells and just zero in on one and pick it up. And it can be tiny. I call them minis. I have my little mini collection.”  

One of Eil’s beach friends is Lola Sinelli. She appreciates everything about Eil.

“Aside from the shelling she does - and loves - she’s got the best heart,” Lola Sinelli said. "She’s the most wonderful person. Married to a wonderful husband. And they’re a great couple. She’s a love. She’s a wonderful person. I mean, why else would you leave all those shells for other people?”

Who else but a shell fairy?

“I think we need to bring the shell fairy name back,” Eil jokes. “I don’t want to be called the shell lady, with the cats behind me and the big overcoat."