The saltmarsh has its own rich tang of whisky, earth and algae

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jan/27/country-diary-old-hall-marshes-essex-rich-tang

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A tongue of land borrowed from the mouth of the Blackwater estuary. Inside the mile-long V of grassy banks that exclude the sea the tamed land is riven by the contorted veins of once-tidal channels, now filled with freshwater. Today they are frozen into wide, snaking sheets of white. The khaki reeds that fringe the ice blend into fields of dead grass dotted with the greener humps of ancient yellow meadow ant hills.

Outside the seawall the sombre estuarine mud is densely carved into curled knolls by the dendritic tidal excavations. The higher areas are carpeted with a wiry mat of grey-leaved sea purslane, while the exposed mud in the channels is criss-crossed by probing redshank, grey plover and curlew. Between these two zones horizontal rims of salty ice mark the last two nights’ high tides. The air is largely still, under a blue sky, but bears the rich salty reek of saltmarsh, a mixture of whisky, earth and algae.

Where sea meets wall, there grow occasional thigh-high bushes of a scarce plant, the shrubby sea-blite (Suaeda vera). A succulent, like many coastal plants, it stores water to help it cope with the extreme conditions; its leaves are like rice-sized green and red jellybeans.

We stalk along the single hawthorn thicket looking for owls. A flock of hundreds of brent geese arise from a cattle-grazed field. The little dark geese emit a cacophony of plaintive warbling honks as they wheel across the sky. Then we flush a peregrine falcon, which flies onto a fence post, making the post look undersized. Eventually this sleek, barrel-chested predator takes off on robust pointed wings and powers away towards the mudflats.

Adjoining the northern flank of Old Hall Marshes is a broad saltmarsh channel, river-like, but without an inland reach, it is populated by nattering ducks: wigeon, teal, shelduck and shoveler. Like the brent geese, which breed in the summer on islands north of Siberia, most of the ducks and waders are also long-distant migrants, having descended in thousands from breeding grounds arrayed to the north. No one is more pleased than the falcon.

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