Did you ever notice the inspiration that comes from a good walk? While tramping the field paths of Canewdon with the all-weather dog this morning, I was cogitating about the possible subjects to blog about this week. The sky was slowly turning from pale pink to blue as suddenly something caught my eye. A shaft of sunlight lit up an object, that was coloured gold with tints of pink and blue, perched in the top of the hedgerow . Now even this bad birdwatcher knows the corn buntings currently jangling from every available perch are not the most colourful, so it was definitely not a red-list species that I'd spied!Alas, it turned out to be another one of our old foes, a shiny balloon - escaped from the clutches of some Disney fan, on a day trip to Southend perhaps? Now I blogged about these before, probably this time last year, so I'll not subject you to another of those rants. But it turned my head to the subject of resources, and the old reduce, re-use, recycle message that has been around since the heady days of Anita Roddick refilling our Body Shop bottles with shampoo and body lotion.The recycle message is one that permeates the Wild Coast Project at all levels. It helps that we live in Rochford District Council, which is the best in the UK for recycling. The most obvious example of our belief in this ethos is in our beneficial re-use of the material arising from the Crossrail tunnelling under London. This clay, a by-product of Europe's largest engineering project, will allow us to restore the marshland landscape to its former medieval glory. But we employ this recycling mode in other areas of our work too. Just last summer , we teamed our volunteers up with the Art Factory from Benfleet to create our 'people perches' from flotsam and jetsam washed up from the river tides along the coastline of Wallasea Island. These are now being put to good use by weary walkers along the seawall path - and no doubt more than a few jangling buntings and other perchers!Most recently, our fledgling Community Learning team have been helping young library visitors to save wildlife by the careful recycling of household items that often cause great harm and suffering to creatures in our countryside. Although to bystanders, it may have looked like a cross between a christmas pantomime and the unpacking of a shopping bag, the youngsters and their families entered into the spirit of this message wholeheartedly and will think twice before dropping litter again, I'm sure.Looking to the future, I hope that we will be able to develop our facilities with more than an eye to the environmental impact of buildings and equipment used. If any of you readers see any really good, green ideas on your travels that you think might suit the Wild Coast please drop me a line.
The picture below is of 'one that got away' - a people perch which lives outside my office, with assorted other articles retrieved from the island edges!