Connecting with wetlands

"It occurred to me the other day, that I didn’t know the exact definition of a wetland. We were walking in the Yorkshire Dales, under a soft skylark rain, ecstatic squalls of curlew song and the squeaky dog-toy weeps of lapwing.

Rushes brushed my trouser legs, water squelched with every step. Wet land, for sure. But wetland? I couldn’t say.

There are scientific definitions, of course – specifying permanent or seasonal inundation or saturation; characteristic vegetation types. Someone will have done a survey, ticked a box, made a designation. But even that could change with climate, with upstream management, with the arrival or extinction of species. There’s nothing static about wet, or land. Like much of nature, neither care for categories.

What I do know is that these places exert extraordinary power over us. We might articulate a million reasons for our attraction to them: an interest in birds or insects; the wellbeing benefits of wild swimming or paddleboarding; the solitude of a day’s fishing. Perhaps they are just the easiest way to please a whole family on a day out. But there’s more to it than that, I’m sure."

A personal connection

"We are water born and waterborne: briny-blooded, our cells are swamps that fizz and bubble with uncountable reactions that can only happen with this chemical loose cannon as a medium. Water behaves like no other molecule: shape-shifter, mover of mountains, bearer of fertility, soother of souls, springer of surprises, giver and taker of life, universal solvent and agent of endless change. We can’t get enough of this weird, wild, wet stuff because it is the ancient home we carry inside us still.

Wetlands are as ineffable as water. Never wholly one thing, they are edge-scapes, ecotones, liminal spaces: always dynamic, always dual. It is this inconsistency, this fluidity, this queerness, even, that makes them so biologically diverse. Perhaps that’s what draws us too. In places that are neither one thing or another but an endlessly shifting all-ness, there is – or should be – space for every wild life, human or more than."

Dr Amy-Jane Beer is a biologist, writer, editor, outdoor enthusiast and mum from North Yorkshire.

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