Marco Island With Kids

Marco is not the shelling island of southwest Florida's reputation, and that turns out not to matter with children, because the game is finding one good thing rather than filling a bucket.

The walkable shelling is on the Tigertail flats and along the Gulf beach after a blow, and it is best at low tide in the early morning before anybody else has walked it. Winter, after a front has pushed water onto the beach, is the productive season. Common finds are fighting conchs, olives, cockles, pen shells, coquinas and the small flat sand dollars the spit is named after.

The rule that matters: living shells must be put back. A shell with an animal in it is not a souvenir, and Florida rules on collecting live shells are strict. Sand dollars that are brown and fuzzy are alive; white and bleached ones are not. Teaching that distinction is half the fun and stops the bucket going home smelling of low tide.

If you want the real thing, the boat-only islands to the south — Kice Island and the beaches toward Cape Romano — have shell lines nobody has picked over, because nobody can drive there. Charters out of Goodland do this as a three or four hour trip, timed to a falling tide so the beach is exposed when you land. It is the best money a family with a shell-obsessed eight-year-old can spend here.

Take a small field guide or a laminated identification card. The naming is the part that outlasts the holiday.

Marco Island Historical Museum is free, level, air-conditioned and about an hour's worth of interest for primary-age children: a reconstructed Calusa village at full size, several hundred objects, and the story of the 1896 excavation that pulled carved wooden artefacts out of the muck here in near-perfect condition. It opens Tuesday to Saturday during the day.

Otter Mound Preserve is fifteen minutes, free, and works better with children than it sounds: a short mulched path over a Calusa shell mound, with terrace walls somebody built out of whelk shells in the last century. The idea that the hill under your feet is made of dinner is a good one to leave a nine-year-old with.

Burrowing owl spotting is the island's best free game. From roughly February to July, staked and flagged burrows sit on vacant residential lots all over Marco, usually with a wooden perch in front and often an adult owl standing on it. Give each child a set of binoculars and a tally. The rule is absolute: watch from the pavement or the car, never step onto the lot.

Bowling and arcade games are available at the lanes attached to one of the island's larger resorts, which is the reliable wet-afternoon answer with children old enough to hold a ball.

The cinema at Marco Walk handles the rest.

The city's community park, named for Frank E. Mackle Jr, has playground and open-space facilities and a community centre that runs seasonal programmes. If you are here for a week rather than a weekend, it is worth checking what is on.

Kayaking in the sheltered water at Isles of Capri or in the Tigertail lagoon suits confident children from about eight, in a tandem with an adult.