SSSI, OJ And Legume (Thanks @Buzz_dont_tweet )

I was lucky enough to have had one of my pics chosen for the Buglife Calendar. All of the competition winners were invited to a tour, guided by an entomologist, of Canvey Wick SSSI.

I thought it was a wonderful prize and have been looking forward to it for months. I imagined meeting fellow toggers from whom I could get tips, particularly on the use of ring flash which I haven’t fully mastered.

I was the only taker. :( I met lovely, young, lean-limbed Dr Sarah Henshall and she first explained about the trouble that was taken just to construct the car park area and route into the SSSI. Its population of great crested newts and adders had to be carefully re-located before work could progress. The site is due to open to the public later this year.

Dr Sarah vaulted ditches and bounded up banks like an antelope, I scrambled behind her, sometimes on all fours. One of the first pics I bagged was a brown-banded carder bee, shame it wasn’t a shrill carder for which the site is famous. Bees and butterflies love the swathes of legumes. Vetches of beautifully varying hues, lucerne, everlasting sweet pea, hairy vetchling, goat‘s rue, birdsfoot and hop trefoils are interspersed with the bright magenta blooms and silver downy leaves of rose campion. I saw my first marbled white butterfly and managed to get a pic before the day was out.

The site is dominated by views of a huge iron jetty, one of the longest in the world, that winds its way for a mile across the mudflats to the Thames reach. It cost ten million to build in the 1970s and is known locally as the OJ. Dr S says there are plans to demolish it but she thinks English Heritage has become interested in preserving the structure. I’m into abandoned and urbex photography, I think it should remain.

I was under the impression that the Occidental site was abandoned because of a shift to North Sea oil but I have just read that it was owing to concerns about the safety of people living nearby. Infrastructure costing fifty-five million was in place. It is this network of concrete roads, tarmac oil tank bases and areas that were covered with river silt that gives the SSSI its unique character. It has “more biodiversity per square foot than any other site in the UK” and has been dubbed a “brownfield rainforest”.

I had a list with me of all the weird and wonderful invertebrates that can be found here. We proceeded to a dyke where I was hoping to spot the rare spreadwing damselfly. No luck but we saw plenty of damsels and dragons.

Sarah’s sandy mound was next. A place where adders bask in the morning and where she sits and eats her lunch watching beewolves carrying their hapless prey. Tiny ’cliffs’ have been constructed in the shell-rich pile of silt to enhance the habitat for hole-dwelling insects. We saw a huge, predatory, black wasp with a red spot on its abdomen but it was too quick for me. I love the view from the knoll. I like the counterpoint of wild and commercial.

The tarmac tank circles heat up in the sun and there is a special habitat at their edges with beautiful drought-loving sedums, reminiscent of suburban rock gardens or trendy town green/living roofs and walls.

Dr S went off to a meeting and I had the entire SSSI to myself. I ventured slightly beyond its boundary and onto a concrete wharf. Just me and a couple of scruffy oystercatchers for company under the midday sun, cooled by a stiff breeze. It felt quite surreal, I loved it.

Sarah returned with a guy from the RSPB, which shares responsibility for managing the site. They discussed strategies and inspected an orchid island that had been left untouched in a tract that had been cleared. Intervention is required to preserve micro habitats. Eventually this place would become impenetrable scrub which would reduce its biodiversity.

RSPB man showed us where a very pretty, unidentified, we thought orchid-like, plant was growing. There had been talk that it might be extremely rare. I took pics but said that I wouldn’t post them as the location of anything rare can be a sensitive issue.

I have since heard from Sarah that she has identified it as round leafed wintergreen, a member of the heath family. It is a scarce plant but not as rare as originally thought. Bit of a shame really as it has protuberant, pink, phallic styles. Rare and phallic are both attention-grabbing. I was imagining it being a poster plant to promote Buglife and the SSSI. :)

Thank you Buglife and Dr Sarah for a very interesting and enjoyable day. I went to the beach afterwards and had a paddle in my wellies.