picnic at Fingringhoe

I made a return visit to the nature reserve at Fingringhoe today, this time without the company of the over-talkative warden.  It was very calm and peaceful, and we didn't see many other people.  Out at the mouth of the river Colne two Thames barges made their serene way.

We didn't see many birds either.  July isn't a great month for bird watching.  They have largely finished breeding and are moulting and skulking about.  One of our number is a keen bird-watcher, and was equipped with a pair of binoculars, so was busy trying to decide if the things swimming around on one of the ponds were coots, moorhens, dabchicks or some sort of unusual duck.  I can never see anything through binoculars, although I can recognise coots and moorhens if I get a clear view of them, but I don't mind not knowing what birds are, or at least I use large and vague categories like 'duck', 'seagull', 'small brown one' or 'some sort of thrush'.  The last category covers fieldfares and redwings as well as bona-fide thrushes that are too far off to tell (without binoculars) if they are song or mistle.

I'm not very good at the names of wild flowers either.  Some people find this odd, but by taste and training I'm a gardener, not a field botanist.  I can recognise the weed species that trouble me in our garden, and know what sort of roots they have and how they spread, though I don't know all their names.  Gardening conditions your view of nature, and I found it impossible to respond with delight to a bank of purple loosestrife (or willowherb) that my companions found beautiful, because I couldn't shake off the image of those brittle white roots running through the borders at a rate of knots.  Even though they were not in a garden setting, and I could see that they were excellent insect plants with lots of visiting bees, I couldn't quite help thinking of the plant as a tricksy weed.

In general the pendulum has swung back from categorising plants as 'weeds' and seeking to control them and towards classing them as 'wild flowers' and therefore desirable.  I remember that when I was a child many more road verges were cut numerous times through the year and sprayed with herbicides to get rid of the messy weeds.  Nowadays driving around north Essex I see cow parsley, hogweed, yarrow, red and white campion, mallows and many others blooming in the summer verges.  This must partly be down to economics, as the money isn't there to cut more than a couple of times a year, and partly down to a re-thinking on pesticides.  Nearly half a century after publication of The Silent Spring we are more cautious about their toxicity than back in the spray-happy days of the 1960s and 1970s, when nature seemed so easy to control, and to need controlling.  And road verges are being recategorised as 'wildlife corridors', useful linking habitats.  There are even some in Essex that are designated sites of wildlife interest in their own right.

The reserve at Fingringhoe provides lots of picnic tables, and we were able to find one that had the right degree of shade, not too hot and not too cold.  A rain cloud passed not very far away, but just avoided us, and we used the excuse of it being a picnic to eat too much pudding.  It is a nice peaceful spot, and I recommend it.