Last week we stayed in a cottage on Curry Farm in east Essex, a 65 acre private nature reserve near Bradwell-on-Sea on the Blackwater Estuary.

To my mind, Essex is a much underestimated county – this part in the east has lots of rivers and estuaries, and is really very rural with a lot of wildlife to be seen.

Stephen Dewick and his wife Jean live at Curry farm today but it was Stephen’s late father who bought the farm back in 1932 and apples and then cereals were grown there until the early 1990s. Now, however, the land is totally given over to wildlife conservation. Stephen, like his father before him, has been extremely interested in macro moths his entire life and, incredibly, a moth trap has been run at Curry Farm on an almost nightly basis since 1946!

But it’s not any old moth trap because it is apparently the largest in the country. It is a purpose built building with soil banked up around its sides to keep it cool and a light on the roof to bring the moths in:

The light has a 400 watt high-UV bulb:

Moths are drawn to the light and fall into a large funnel around it, leading down into the room below:

Every day of our stay we went into the moth trap with Stephen to inspect the day’s catch, while he told us about the interesting moths he has caught at Curry Farm over the years. Even though it is still only early March, he is already getting a lot of moths and I cannot imagine what it will be like in there over the summer. Rather than counting and logging every moth, though, each day he records which macro moths are new for the year as well as always being on the look out for any rarities.

In 1951 one such rarity to the UK was first recorded at Curry Farm by his father and the moth was named after him – the Dewick’s Plusia moth. Until recently this moth has been a very rare immigrant to this country but has now almost certainly started breeding here. Recorded sightings of this moth have surged since 2018 in southern and eastern counties. Who knows, perhaps I will find one on my trap at home this summer:

One sunny morning of our stay we spent time exploring the reserve. Stephen is kept pretty busy because he manages it all entirely on his own:

The nearby Chapel of St Peter-on-the-Wall is one of the oldest, largely intact churches in England and is still in regular use:

Just beyond St Peter-on-the-Wall, there is the Bradwell shell bank, now a 30 acre nature reserve where apparently little tern and ringed plover breed:

As we walked along the shell bank, we were amazed to see such huge numbers of dark-bellied brent geese feeding on the winter wheat in some poor farmer’s field:

The reason we were in Essex was to go on two separate Naturetrek birding days. The first of these was in the Heybridge Basin, near Maldon. Unfortunately it was a foggy day which wasn’t great for looking at birds, but at least it was calm and dry:

Although the fog remained the entire time, we spent a gentle day strolling along the estuary in a small group of interesting people, with our expert guide Neil showing us many more birds than we would otherwise have noticed:

On the second Naturetrek day trip we met Neil again at the RSPB Wallasea reserve. This is a brand new and really interesting reserve and one that we will definitely return to whenever we are in the area. Between 2011 and 2015, over 3 million tonnes of spoil from London’s newly dug Crossrail tunnels were transported to Essex to create the reserve. This earth was used to raise the low-lying land, construct new sea defenses, and create a 740-hectare habitat of lagoons, mudflats, and salt marshes

By lunchtime we had already built up a list of sixty bird species that had been spotted. We’d had good views of a hen harrier and this photo below is of a greater scaup and a red breasted merganser – both birds that I have very rarely seen:

When Dave was a boy living in north Devon in the early 1970s, a little egret turned up on the nearby estuary resulting in a major bird twitch that he can still remember clearly. Little egrets were only occasional vagrants in the UK until the 1980s but now it is estimated that there are 2,500 breeding pairs here:

Similarly, when Dave and I started getting properly interested in birds about twenty years ago, the Mediterranean gull was still quite a notable and exciting bird. At Wallasea, however, there are now whole islands full of them:

Brown hares are plentiful along the coastal areas of Essex and we enjoyed seeing them throughout our stay there, although rarely managing a photo. Here are three having a little rest from their chasing around and boxing at Wallasea:

Unfortunately it started raining soon after lunch, scuppering our chances of seeing the short-eared owls and barn owls that are regular on the reserve.

We had a really good few days in Essex. It isn’t so very far away from us here in Kent and, such is the lure of the walk-in moth trap, that we have now booked to stay there again for a few nights this summer.

How many moths will be in this trap each morning when we revisit Curry Farm in August?