Bewitched by wetlands

It always strikes me that the word ‘wetlands’, as a generic term, fails to do justice not only to the diversity of the swamps, marshes, fens, bogs, mires, mangroves and more to which it refers, but also to their rich connotations of eeriness, mystery and otherworldliness. Perhaps there are so many kinds of ‘wetland’ that the term is in danger of being stretched too thin.

Though one might presume a wetland to be easily recognisable as such, even that might be pushing the figurative boat out a little. A reed-fringed marsh or a cypress swamp will easily tick the box. But what about a repurposed sewage works, a reservoir seasonally squatted by migrant birds, or a flooded field? To my mind, the answer has to be yes for any of the above.

When I set out to write my book Swamp Songs, I had a vague idea of using Romney Marsh as a yardstick against which I could compare other wetlands. In doing so, I thought I could arrive at a sense of whether they share common traits, or whether their diversity – physical, cultural, geomorphic and other – are such that any attempt would be futile. Ultimately, I think I reached both conclusions, such is the ambiguous nature of wetlands!

Shaped by humankind

Romney Marsh sits at the south-eastern tip of Kent. To be strictly accurate, it consists of three areas, Romney, Denge and Walland marshes, each fed by a different confluence of river courses, but which cover around 100 square miles. Like so many wetlands, it is not a ‘pure product’ of nature, its origins lying in the early Church’s efforts at land reclamation by ‘inning’, draining and protecting pasturelands. These were mostly given over to grazing sheep in astronomical numbers until the post-war push for food, which saw much of the pasture turned over for arable land. But the Marsh sits mostly below sea level, and its patchwork of fields form a kind of tessellated mosaic, each piece in the puzzle separated from its neighbour by one of the ancient ditches or ‘sewers’ – rich habitats for fish, amphibians and birds.

Were it not for the sea wall that protects most of it, and the natural bulwark of the vast shingle ‘desert’ around Dungeness, Romney would most probably revert to a muddy lagoon, its boundaries indistinct and coming and going at the behest of the tides and the seasons.

For much of the 16th through to the early 19th century, the Marsh was largely given over to a smuggling economy – first, the illicitly tax-free export of wool to the Continent, latterly, the import of tobacco and spirits and fine clothes – with a complex system of governance comprised of ‘lords and jurats [a person who performs a duty on oath] of the Marsh’ in place to ensure landowners took equal responsibility for protecting its seawall and waterways.

I found an unexpected but moving parallel in the mangrove swamps of West Bengal’s Sundarbans, where I went in search of tigers on an island called Bali (spoiler alert – I saw none!). It brought to life the hardships of life at the fringes of Romney in the past, and the travails of the Bali inhabitants in the present.

Recovered from the sea

Bali is largely reclaimed, and surrounded by a sea wall that protects low-lying crops such as rice and millet, and grazing for sheep, goats and cows. The islands of the inner Sundarbans reserve, where the Bengal tiger still holds sway, lie some distance away and are only reachable by boat. At low tide, the mangrove juts, dagger-like, through the mud. At the fringes, monkeys forage on the foreshore and slender deer are briefly bipedal as they rear up to reach the tenderest leaves on the sundri trees that give their name to the Sundarbans.

While Bali’s villagers mostly subsist on what they can earn through selling their crops, each year fishers or their families are killed by tigers as they venture into the inner reserve to fish or gather honey with which to supplement their incomes. Yet there is great respect for the big cats, and a rich folklore in which Ma Bonbibi, the tiger goddess, plays a major role in a pantheon of local gods and demigods.

But it is the rising level of the sea caused by climate change that poses the greater existential threat to the islanders’ livelihoods – and indeed, the tigers themselves. In 2009, Cyclone Aila battered the Sundarbans, destroying the earthworks that constitute the sea wall, flattening houses and crops. Shortly after I left the island in 2020 a friend sent me footage of villagers working continuously to stop rising, swirling floodwaters tearing at the wall. Bali cannot afford the concrete barrier that now prevents Romney Marsh from slipping back into the English Channel. For centuries, it was beaten mud, built on a bed of blackthorn, that protected the wetlands, the Marshmen pitching in each year to ensure the wall would be strong enough to withstand winter storms.

Small is beautiful

One of the greatest aspects of the diversity of wetlands is that while some cover vast swathes (the Sudd of Sudan covers nearly 60,000km2 in the rainy season), even the smallest confer great benefits – for man and nature alike. My express purpose in travelling to Cyprus was to see the salt lakes – fabled in antiquity for their uniqueness and extraordinary saline bounty.

For bird lovers – or indeed, aficionados of all things pink – flamingos provide the big draw, with first cohorts arriving in late November or December, and numbers increasing so that by the height of the spring season, up to 12,000 are feasting on a brine shrimp, Artemia salina. The shrimp, and the flamingos, mostly have the lakes to themselves now, but for centuries, and up until the 1960s, the salt was harvested in the height of summer when the lakes were at their driest. During the British occupation, it was strictly forbidden for the inhabitants to gather salt without the requisite permissions.

Arriving in May, I came a little too late for the flamingos, most having moved on to the next leg of their Mediterranean tour, leaving only a few stragglers, juveniles and perhaps the lazy, to fossick among the remaining, evaporating pools. But I found myself enchanted by a much smaller marsh, close to Larnaca airport.

Where the salt lakes are shimmering, viscous and intimidating in their sun-beaten expanse, Oroklini, discreetly hidden by reeds from the road in an otherwise unprepossessing plain of scrub and low-rise development, is lush and intimate. It’s a kind of mecca for bird species, some of which we see in the UK (red-crested pochards, Kentish plovers, little terns), but others that would be included on a UK rarity list.

When I visited, it was breeding season for the black-winged stilts, red legs a flutter among the rushes. The spur-winged lapwings were there too, somewhere – but keeping their heads down. Harriers, ibis, grebes, multiple representatives of the egret mob are all variously long-term inhabitants or regular visitors to Oroklini.

Absent (in this case, European Union) funding, the marsh stood to fall prey to an unholy alliance of familiar menaces to wetlands: invasive plants such as eucalyptus and acacia overrunning the native vegetation, desiccation caused by local development, run-off from agricultural land poisoning the water life. But the dedication of local environmentalists ensured that this small wetland jewel could continue to provide a haven not only for the 190 species of bird that use Oroklini but for the other two-legged creatures that come to observe them. For if there is any near-universal quality possessed by wetlands, whether on home turf or further flung, it is both their fragility but also their receptiveness to sensitive environmental management.

Birds are particularly quick to respond to the opportunities presented by wetlands, for feeding, breeding and shelter. What I think is near unique about such habitats is that, if astutely managed, avian species and our own can enjoy them, even with a degree of complementarity.

Living together

Rye Harbour sits at the southern corner of Romney Marsh, separated from the dunes at Camber Sands by the last straight stretch of the River Rother, and illustrates both qualities perfectly. It is a popular spot for dog walkers, families, couples and solitary spirits alike – but the not-inconsiderable numbers that typically perambulate its perimeter paths do nothing to deter the birds that feed and breed among its pools and islets.

Egrets, Mediterranean gulls, little terns, godwits, plovers of assorted sizes, gadwall, garganey, avocets and ouzels are regulars – and since the rehabilitation of the reserve over the past decades, flora such as viper’s bugloss, yellow horned-poppy, purslane and scurvy grass have returned, needing little encouragement. (My favourite time to be at Rye is towards the end of the day when the cormorants are returning, like squadrons of military aircraft, from their fishing grounds off the coast of Dungeness.)

Rye Harbour is a very actively managed site – grist to the mill, perhaps for that potentially unanswerable question as to where the boundaries between ‘nature’ and ‘artifice’ lie. To me, this says that there is no necessary contradiction between the needs of the plover, the cormorant, the twitcher – or a family of five stretching its legs.

We are a small island, with numerous competing needs. Sometimes the buffers between nature (which is seldom pristine) and the appurtenances of modernity are perilously slender. By dint of their fragility, wetlands are particularly sensitive to such distinctions. Industrial overreach can have devastating effects. And yet they can also be surprisingly resilient – if the right accommodations are made.

In the sunken forest

The Atchafalaya Basin, to the east of New Orleans in the US state of Louisiana, is to my mind one of the ‘wetland wonders of the world’. In deep ‘Cajun country’ (many locals still speak the French that they brought with them via Nova Scotia in the early 18th century), the classic tropes of the American swamp are here: semi sunken forests of cypress, draped in moody Spanish moss, and a local industry of harvesting crawfish that draws tourists, but also some 60% of migratory North American birds.

The basin is crucial to the routinely hurricane-bashed state because of its ability to absorb excess floodwaters – and thus protect the (very visible) industrial plants, including oil refineries and aluminium smelters, with which it coexists.

There are many who are concerned that the various activities of the oil industry in particular – such as dredging new waterways and cutting conduits for pipes – will lead to silting and the drying out of parts of the swamp, to the detriment not only of the ecosystem for its own sake, but for the state and its inhabitants. But these are sensitive local issues in Louisiana, a poor state that relies on industry for employment and revenue, and they take skilful negotiation between stakeholders: environmental groups, government, employers, fishers and others.

Much of the basin is bounded by a levee. The first step to getting to grips with the swamp’s issues, the mayor of the basin town of Henderson told me when I visited him on the stoop porch of the weatherboarded building that his office shared with the two-person police station, was just to look over the lip of the levee. And then to start to appreciate the wonders that lie beyond it.

In his case, said Mayor Sherbin Collette, he had lived in such close proximity to the swamp for so long that it took an outsider, a PhD researcher from faraway Missouri, to help him peel back the layers of familiarity and recognise something so much more than the everyday. ‘She said, “Mayor Collette, what do you see when you look out at the swamp?”, and I said, “What do you mean what do I see? I see the alligators. I see the swamp trees. I see the egrets…”

‘She said, “But Mayor Collette, don’t you also see the beauty?” (This latter word he pronounced in the strong Cajun accent that rhymes it with ‘moody’ and ‘foody’.)

This was the moment of his epiphany. All of a sudden, the swamp became beautiful to him, opening new vistas of meaning, purpose and pleasure.

Perhaps all wetlands, whether their expanse is a million acres or a few hundred metres, should be so revered and regarded. And perhaps this is the elusive truth about them, which transcends the many differences.

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