The best watering hole in Essex

Simon Garnham heads out for his evening on a flight pond that he dug after returning to civilian life following a career in the Marines

- Simon Garnham

Truly wild ducks come from unimaginably lonely places. They move mostly at the witching hours of dawn and dusk or under a full moon. They are magical, mysterious quarry. Once you have seen a wedge of mallard or wigeon and heard them calling to one another in a frosty, moonlit sky, it is hard not to become utterly bewitched. It is a feeling that makes a Gun trudge many miles through thick mud in the pre-dawn blackness delighting in bitter weather and gale-force winds.

Paradoxically, the urge to hunt these wonderful species goes hand-in-hand with the urge to nourish, to protect and to nurture them. Wildfowlers tend also to be the finest of naturalists. Scott, Savory, Cadman, Falkus, Willock, Humphreys, Campbell-Black, Novorol, Paley, Watkins-Pitchford. There is a seemingly inexhaustible list of nature’s finest observers who learned their trade knee-deep in ooze, with frost-bitten fingers and damp toes.

While there is no doubt that the premier place to pursue wildfowl is below the sea wall, one of life’s great privileges is also to watch wild duck pitching into a flight pond. The wildest of birds chatter to one another on a pond in much the same way we might hear the rising and falling of conversation in a busy, contented pub. October wigeon, exhausted from their arduous migration, tired and thin, slip through the gales looking for the holy trinity of freshwater, food and shelter. The careful mallard raises her ducklings near to the pond, maternal and protective, glad of the cover on the water’s edge. Teal pitch in for a drink, whistling softly to one another, reassured by the pond’s open aspect.