One side effect of Covid19 has been the near-elimination of most overseas travel. Looking positively though, this gives us all chance to reconnect with the wildlife and landscape around us. And so it was that Naturetrek started to offer socially-distanced day tours in Britain, and gave me the chance to continue what I spent much of my working life doing, putting Essex on the wildlife map.

Billed as ‘The Wild Side of Essex: Autumn in the Colne Estuary’ seemed a little pessimistic given they were starting in August, but as it transpired the weather on both occasions was less than summery. The first coincided with Atlantic Storm Ellen sweeping across the country, 50mph winds buffeting us all day, and the second was as the next named storm, Francis, was subsiding…but leaving turbulent weather in its wake, storms of almost tropical intensity interspersed with hot, humid sunshine, and an abrupt change of wind direction near the end of the day which saw temperatures plummet by several degrees in just a few minutes.

Nevertheless, we had fun in the unseasonal wind and rain, and found plenty of wildlife to keep us interested.

Estuary birds were starting to return from their northern breeding places, with many Black-tailed Godwits in particular still in smart summer plumage, hundreds on the downstream itinerary, but also some, giving much better views, on the upstream walk.

Also downstream, lots of Redshanks, about sixty Avocets, and a few Curlews, Turnstones and Little Egrets gave added spice, as migrating Swallows struggled into the wind, and a couple of White Wagtails completed the migrant roll call.

Smaller birds in general were kept very low by the inclement weather, although the woods and hedges were shrilling to calls of roving Long-tailed and Blue Tit flocks. In Wivenhoe Park, a Green Woodpecker put on a good show of hunting for ants.

Insects were also hard work, given the weather, but by heading for shelter and taking advantage of sunny spells, we came upon seven species of Odonata, mostly Common Darters and Migrant Hawkers. Upstream, the latter were almost swarming in places, and the aggregations included single Brown Hawker and most excitingly given its only recent arrival in these parts, a Southern Migrant Hawker…sadly without providing a photo opportunity.

Butterflies included both summer stragglers (Common Blue, Small Heath, Small Copper and Gatekeeper) and the autumnal fare of Red Admiral and Speckled Wood…

…while moths provided interest in their larval stages – Cinnabar (on Hoary Ragwort), Toadflax Brocade (a recent recolonist of the UK) and the impressive case of Coleophora kuehnella.

Other invertebrates included Green Shield-bug and Scorpion-fly, Batman Hoverfly and Pine Ladybird, while an Elm Zig-zag Sawfly larva was only the second time I have found this recent British arrival around Wivenhoe.

Of course, one doesn’t always need to see a creature to know it is there, for example when its activities trigger the formation of a gall in a host plant. Autumn is the best time to find these, and on our walks the most productive hosts were Pedunculate Oak (spangle, silk-button, marble and knopper galls, for example), Dog Rose (smooth pea and Robin’s pincushion galls) and willows (bean and camellia galls).

Much the same is true of fungi, microfungi in particular. Some of those do indeed also induce galls: others however, while not distorting the leaf growth, do give rise to distinctive symptoms – take for example the mildew Erysiphe alphitoides on the summer leaves of Oak, and tar-spot Rhytisma acerinum on Sycamore.

Large fungi though were few and far between, the main ones being long-lived bracket fungi like Chicken-of-the-Woods in Wivenhoe Park. No doubt this reflects the two intense drought periods of spring and summer this year: perhaps the late August rains bode well for the rest of the autumn?

The final flowerings of summer included all sorts of specialities, from block-paving rarities (Jersey Cudweed and Four-leaved Allseed)…

… to salt and grazing marsh specialities like Sea Wormwood, Strawberry Clover, Golden Samphire, Sea Aster and Perennial Glasswort …

… showy remnants of the summer meadows (Chicory and Field Scabious) mingling with autumnal nectar sources (Common Toadflax and Perforate St John’s-wort) and nationally scarce Lesser Calamint, feast for the nose as well as the eyes …

… to the colonisers of ‘life after gravel extraction’ at Cockaynes Reserve,  such as Common Fleabane, Trailing St John’s Wort, the non-native Epilobium brachycarpum, Smooth Hawkbit (at its only known Essex site), and Heather at its last locality in the area, this year more magnificent then ever before.

A feature of this year seems to be the early and heavy fruiting of trees and shrubs, Nature’s autumnal bounty writ large. No doubt these will feature heavily in the next few walks:

And last but not least, the one things pretty much immune to the vagaries of the wild weather (we hope!) there were magnificent trees everywhere, especially in Wivenhoe Park with its historic 200 year-old Cork Oaks.

 All part of the Wild Side of Essex, from birds to botany, galls to geology!

One of the many delights of life in Wivenhoe is the presence of a weekly vegetable bag scheme, produce that is both local (with lower carbon footprint than most supermarket veg) and healthy (being organic, and thus lacking in pesticide residues). The vegetables come from Bennison Farm bennisonfarm.co.uk in Thorrington, and we were recently given access to the farm with WildSmiths wildsmiths.co.uk to look at its natural features. Greg and Sarah Smith have been volunteers on the farm, and realised at first hand the wildlife riches it contains, testament to the nature of the horticultural system used.

First and foremost, the cultivated ground of Bennison’s, while evidently productive, is full of ‘arable plants’, the sort of things we used to know as ‘weeds’ but which we have now come to value for their scarcity, following their loss from conventional intensive cultivation systems. An organic system is without artificial inputs: in the absence of toxic herbicides, necessary weed control is done through a combination of tractor-mounted steerage hoe, flame weeders and lots of back-breaking manual labour! But the combination of these can never, thankfully, achieve their wholesale eradication.

And so we were able to enjoy long-forgotten scenes of all sorts of arable plant growing among the intended crops: Greg has already found more than 90 species (click here for list), including several local rarities, such as Sharp-leaved Fluellen, Henbit Dead-nettle, Corn Spurrey, Annual Knawel and Field Pennycress:

The scarcer ones were mixed with the more frequent, but still declining, Sun Spurge, Fumitory, Wall Speedwell and Black Nightshade:

Plants such as Fumitory encapsulate neatly why these species matter. They were once so familiar and numerous that a drift of the flowers looked like smoke arising from the earth, the eponymous fumus terrae. What’s more, their 20th Century near-eradication through the over-use of herbicides (poisons) within crops (destined to become our food) also removed its seeds from the landscape: the favoured food of Turtle Doves, the distillation in sound and beauty of our summer…and very likely a national extinction which will be recorded during the next decade.

Some arable plants are genuinely native species, ones which have transitioned from naturally dynamic habitats such as river shingles and mountain screes into the human-disturbed farmlands and gardens. Others have arrived here over the millennia of agriculture and horticulture, often arising in the Middle East or Mediterranean areas, followers in the footsteps of cultivation. And plants are still arriving with us: Hairy Finger-grass has only relatively recently become a feature of horticulture in the UK, probably as a contaminant in crop seed sources, or perhaps as a bird-seed alien:

A good number of the arable plants are in the spinach family, typically with green, unassuming flowers, and consequently often difficult to identify. Half-a-dozen species of these Oraches and Goosefoots were found as we walked, and undoubtedly others will be present. What they lack in floriferousness, make up for in their oil-rich seeds, much loved by seed-eating birds. Examples shown are Fat-hen, Many-seeded Goosefoot and Maple-leaved Goosefoot:

A final suite of interesting plants are (presumably) derived from seeds sown to create green manure crops to maintain soil fertility. Particularly notable among these are clovers – dramatic long-flowered Crimson Clover, pale yellow Sulphur Clover and pink Reversed Clover, the flowers rotated through 180 degrees, so the flowerhead looks as though it has been squashed underfoot:

All these so-called weeds are both interesting in their own right, but also valuable in that they help to support useful invertebrates – ‘useful’ as predators or herbivores of potential pest species, or as pollinators, upon whose activities so many crop plants rely. Ladybirds are a classic example of useful predators, of aphids, and the fields were teeming with them, mostly the common 7-Spots, but also the rather more unusual Adonis Ladybird:

Other at least partially predatory insects included the bugs Deraeocoris flavilinea (a relatively new arrival in Britain) and Heterotoma planicornis (with flattened antennal segments and apple-green legs); Dark Bush-cricket and Oak Bush-cricket. While these are more associated with the surrounding hedges, the presence and maintenance of such good margins undoubtedly helps cast a benign influence on the holding as a whole:

Useful herbivores too – caterpillars of the Cinnabar Moth are renowned for feeding with impunity on toxic Ragwort. Here however, they are feeding upon the related Groundsel, a very common plant of disturbed areas which can limit crop productivity if it gets out of hand. What better than yellow-and-black ‘volunteers’ to help weed it out!

In the same category of natural herbicides could also come the Small Copper butterflies which have been seen egg-laying on the docks are appearing as weeds in the crops. As their sole larval food plant, herbivory in such cases must be having a postive impact.

And then of course pollinators – bees, such as the Tree Bumblebee below, are particularly renowned for this but many other insects play their part too, from hoverflies to beetles. Onesuch, the small malachite beetle Axinotarsus marginalis, a known pollinator, was interesting as it is another recent colonist of Britain, and previously unknown to us.

Of course there was also a vast range of other invertebrates, ones that cannot be argued as directly beneficial to the farm, but the sum total of which gives credence to the idea of organic cultivation as ecological farming, treating the land as an ecosystem to be nurtured and treasure:

Whether common or rare, all are important in the web of life. But it is always exciting to find the scarcities. Only a couple of weeks ago, Sarah found a Pied Shield-bug, for which the Essex Field Club distribution map shows only one other location in the Tendring Peninsula. Likewise, exactly the same comment can be made for the Bryony Bee we photographed on the boundary with Hockley Wood, except that as well as its local scarcity (see map here), it is considered to be nationally rare.

All of the above, and we have hardly even mentioned the showiest of them all, the butterflies, a kaleidoscope of biodiversity weaving their confetti magic throughout the farm: browns, whites, Peacocks and Red Admirals, together with neighbouring woodland specialities – Purple Hairstreak and Silver-washed Fritillary:

Just 3.5 hectares provides more than 150 weekly veg shares, and keeps wildlife and the environment happy. At a time when food standards are at huge risk from the pressures of predatory US producers, with considerably lower, barrel-bottom-scraping standards on pesticide residues and suchlike waiting in the wings following Brexit, we must treasure, support and safeguard those like Bennison Farm that maintain our and the planet’s health.