RSPB Wallasea island Wild Coast Project beckoned and at long last I made it to this little flat corner of the Essex coast. It was a glorious morning but I was not quite prepared for what greeted me as I headed down past the sign telling me that I was officially on this still infant RSPB reserve.
I approached with the windows down and the warm early morning air was full of the sound of Skylarks serenading and Corn Buntings jangling. Reed Buntings did likewise and the first Yellow Wagtails were not only in but engaging in buzzy song flights. In a week’s time I head off to Lesvos once again and I always bemoan the fact that there is nowhere back home that has fields of larks, buntings and wagtails anymore. The larks there may be Crested and the Wagtails, Black and Blue-headed but the sound is the same as I was experiencing here. Simply magical.
I quickly spied two Short-eared Owls tangling over the seawall and after some wing clapping and shouting at each other they flew across in front of me. Over the next few hours I had at least three of these wonderful owls around me and was lucky enough to get a few shots as they went about their morning routine and although ‘herp’ barriers may not be the most aesthetically pleasing perch in the world it did meant that they did regularly sit right alongside the car.
A Barn Owl flew by and a young ringtail male Hen Harrier was doing his best to reduce the Corn Bunting population while Buzzards displayed overhead and a female Peregrine surveyed the fields from a clod. A fine male Wheatear sang from the carpark fence with a Corn Bunting doing likewise just two posts away. I did not know which way to look.
New scrapes were being constructed before my eyes with a production line of diggers, bulldozers and huge dumper trucks re-profiling the landscape.It is much the same sort of project as the work we had done out on Wennington at Rainham in the winter; here though the scale is truly enormous. Those pools already completed and full of water held Teal, Wigeon, Mute Swans, gulls and the ubiquitous Avocets and Oystercatchers and I could imagine just how amazing this site will be when completed.
The other side of the the new wall sat the re-aligned section with its breached old walls creating a myriad of muddy rills, flats and fledgling saltmarsh much in the manner of EWT Abbotts Hall. Redshank and Shelduck were out feeding but the tide had dropped too far for there to be much else.
Little Egrets chased tiddlers in the creeks and a couple of Swallows headed strongly north while various small Andrena bees and the first big Queen Common Carder Bee in all her ginger glory hummed around the vibrant Dandelions.
Will work out which Andrena bee this is!
So there you have it; RSPB Wallasea Island more than lived up to all the praise that my friends had been laying on the place and I will certainly be back to watch it grow and develop, much in the same way that I have watched Rainham evolved in the 12 years I have worked there...
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