Each summer, walkers and residents round Canewdon village, just up the road from Wallasea Island, often hear the unmistakeable,gentle purring sound of Turtle doves.  Some are lucky enough to see them in their back gardens!  So you may be surprised to know that this very special summer visitor is a 'bird on the brink', of extinction.
So up stepped some of our local heroes for nature - the Essex Birdwatchers Society, ably steered by our very own Frank Vargas, Essex Farmland Bird Conservation Officer working from our offices on Wallasea Island. These TD champions have been working alongside the RSPB since last year,  to find ways of supporting the main key elements of Operation Turtle Dove -  with the 'Essex Farmland Bird Conservation Conference' in September, the restoration of habitat for Turtle doves, support of  local farmers by providing expensive essential seed mix and recording the birds’ presence around Essex.
Operation Turtle Dove, launched this week by the RSPB, leading sustainable farming specialists Conservation Grade and Pensthorpe Conservation Trust in Norfolk, is a three-year project to reverse the decline of one of England’s best-loved farmland birds.
Turtle Doves are more often heard than seen, and their distinctive song has long been a characteristic sound of summer. From The Bible to the works of Chaucer and Shakespeare, the turtle dove is well known in literature and folklore as a symbol of love and devotion.  But numbers have fallen dramatically in recent years and there are now just nine birds for every 100 there were in the 1970s.  These birds are on the brink of extinction and many prefer to spend their summers in Essex. 
The RSPB is hoping that people in Essex who are lucky enough to  hear or see Turtle doves in their area will step up for nature and tell us where their local birds are, to help target the project’s research and advice to farmers  and to establish any turtle dove zones around the country. Please report your turtle dove sightings at www.operationturtledove.org or come along to the EBwS conference at Stow Maries in September. - http://www.ebws.org.uk/ebs/default.asp

At last!  A window in the awful weather allowed the contractors to tug the first half of our unloading facility pontoon into place this morning. It was a bit of a foggy, 'soft' morning fo photos but it was great to see the dark shape coming up the River Crouch out of the mists.

Two 76 metre long pontoons will join to create a single jetty, at which ships will unload the essential ingredient for our new nature reserve. Each ship will carry up to 2.5 thousand tons of excavated earth from the Crossrail tunnels being dug, deep down under central London. Once firmly in place, this jetty will accommodate two ships at a time. The equipment on the jetty will include four unloading machines, two on each pontoon, with conveyors feeding hoppers which in turn feed an 800 metre central conveyor that carries the material across the marsh to shore. On the island side of the seawalls, a radial stacker arm will stockpile the clean excavated material in a carefully prepared part of the site before it is placed in carefully planned areas to recreate the new mudflat and saltmarsh levels.

So as you can guess, its quite a sight down there at the moment!  Unfortunately the huge amount of rain has made the site pretty sticky, but the seawall is free draining so walkers may walk along to, and beyond, the crossing point on the seawall. From there you may look seaward viewing the long conveyor belt running down the berm and across the marsh to the pontoon , or landward where the conveyor continues down to the radial stacker. Of course, there is still a good mile or so to walk beyond that to get to the far end of the public footpath, which remains open throughout.  For the armchair viewers, there is always the view from the webcam though. (http://www.carnyx.tv/CarnyxWild/WallaseaIsland.aspx.)

Hopefully, the sun is not too far away and it will soon entice visitors to go and see for themselves.  Our Flickr site has photos from this morning and will be updated once the second half of the pontoon is also in place. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/rspb_wallasea_island_wild_coast_project/sets/)

Some days you just have to get out in the sunshine - but not many have as good an excuse as we had today!!  After the recent expert confirmation that what we had found on the marsh was actually the motor of a German V2 rocket from WWII, we had a race against time to retrieve it before the contractors cut off our access with the start of development of the construction site for cell 1.

Volunteers swiftly moved into position this morning, ably supervised by Ellen Heppell from the ECC Archaeology Field Team. We soon discovered that there was more of it under the marsh than above so plenty of spades made light work and eventually it was free of the sticky essex mud and our friends from HP Elderton skillfully lifted it over the seawall and transported it to a place of security.

This wonderful find will now require some careful conservation so that we may use it in future as part of our education and heritage display.  WWII is just one era which we hope to bring to life for future audiences, as we develop our facilities and events and activities can be more creative.

For the full story check out our Flickr pages on http://www.flickr.com/photos/rspb_wallasea_island_wild_coast_project/sets/

St Patrick's Day ( March 17) turned out to be what the Irish refer to as a 'soft' day, but it didn't deter the entrants to our Wallathon 2012! Our invitation to walk the bounds of RSPB Wallasea went out in all the local papers and on BBC Radio Essex and the enthusiasm with which this was received locally was amazing.
 The RSPB Walvol team turned out in force, and in great cheer, with a variety of green hats, shirts, trousers and boots to add a little fun to the day. Health and safety was added to by the sole member of the Wallasea Mountain Rescue Team! Thanks paul.:)

So as you might guess, we weren't downhearted by the dismal weather and neither were the participants. First up were a dozen cyclists, some having travelled by the newly launched ferry from Burnham-on-crouch. Following them were the runners, quite a few of which came from Rochford Council - great to see you guys!

And last but not least we had a surprising number of walkers - all dressed for the occassion in their wet weather gear - bringing the numbers of hardy people to 72!  Had it been a day with weather the like of which we have had ever since the event we could have been inundated with energetic people wanting to walk the bounds of Wallasea - so let's hope we are able to run it again next year.

Imagine you have a huge house, which you feel safe and comfortable in and it has everything you need - a warm,comfortable bed, cupboards full of food, space for you to raise your family and in which to see them grow up to be strong and healthy.  Then gradually this space is taken over by people. People who don't care that it's your home, don't seem to see you, disrupt your life, your feeding habits and whose dogs scare your children.
This is a problem that the RSPB wrestle with all the time. While we want to bring people closer to nature, share our passion for the wonderful wildlife spectacle in our countryside and encourage people to enjoy the great outdoors with us we also have a duty to care for and protect those unable to protect themselves and who were in those spaces long before we found them. Added to that many of those species, be it animal,insect or flower, are rare and endangered.
RSPB scientists have done quite a bit of survey work on exactly this sort of problem - and I was fortunate enough to be at a presentation about  this subject earler this week. The audience learnt how a nightjar population suffered from predation of nests by crows - but only where dogs scared the mother bird off the nests along a track frequented by dog owners. Another island habitat for Chough was visited in huge numbers by holidaymakers during August. It was found that the fledglings and their parents moved to another area, not as plentiful in food during this invasion and as a consequence failed to thrive and became malnourished and unlikely to survive the winter. In another area several metres either side of a public footpath through scrub showed much less dense a population of wildlfe, which given the length of this track added up to a considerable area
This is a sobering thought to those of us who like our walks in the countryside and own a dog who walks at least 4 times the distance when off the lead!  I guess the answer is to attempt to explain to our visitors that the shiny new sign with an image of a dog on a lead is not just there for 'other dog owners' or ornament. Between the months of March and September the nature we all love to see is busy in a fight for survival. Adders are coming out of hibernation and warming up on the seawall banks, many birds are building nests on the ground ( not all in trees!!) and wild flowers are attracting insects and eventually turning to seeds both of which are food for many things.
Loving Nature means taking care of it too - so that your kids and mine will be able to show the same things to their kids as we do to them. So sorry Fido, you're on the lead from now on!