The heron catches something at last while a farmer’s standing ovation looks like cautious interest
Tuesday. I stood this morning at the edge of the polder for forty minutes doing nothing but watching a heron do considerably less than that, which is the entire discipline of naturalism as I practice it, standing very still while something wilder than you stands even stiller, and eventually one of you blinks and it is never the heron. The polder at dawn is the closest thing I have to church, mist coming off the ditches in long ribbons, the reed warblers doing their scratchy little argument in the rushes, and the whole flat green world laid out exactly as engineered by people who died three centuries ago and would, I think, be quietly satisfied to see it still holding water in all the right places.
I read the international news over coffee after, as I do every morning, a habit that does my blood pressure no favours whatsoever, and there was a piece on Grist’s climate coverage about a wetland restoration project elsewhere in the world running into the exact same bureaucratic tangle we spent eleven years untangling here, and I felt the specific, mixed emotion of recognizing your own old wound in someone else’s fresh one, sympathy and a strange relief both at once, because at least it means the wound is universal and not simply a defect of our own paperwork.
The Otter Question
The real excitement of the week, and by real excitement I mean the kind that makes me forget entire meals, is that the camera trap by the western culvert caught what I am fairly confident, pending confirmation from a colleague with sharper eyes than mine, is otter. We lost our otters here decades ago, poisoned by the water quality of an era this country has mostly apologized for since, and their slow return, culvert by culvert, drainage ditch by drainage ditch, is the single most hopeful data point I track in any given year, more hopeful than any conference, any treaty, any glossy report, because the otter does not care what anyone signed, the otter cares only whether the fish are there and the water is clean enough to swim through without regret, and apparently, this week, in this ditch, it was.
I sent the footage to three colleagues before breakfast, the way you might once have sent an urgent telegram, and one of them, a man who has studied this waterway longer than I have been alive, wrote back a single word, eindelijk, finally, and I sat with that word a long while, because it carries in it not just the joy of the sighting but the whole exhausting decades of waiting that preceded it, every grant application, every water board meeting, every argument about nitrogen levels that went nowhere for years until, suddenly, without any ceremony, it went somewhere, and an otter swam through a culvert and did not know it was making anyone’s year.
The Farmers Next Door
Spoke this afternoon with the farmer whose land borders the reserve on the northern edge, a conversation I approach these days with more patience than I managed a decade ago, because I have learned that a man whose family has worked this specific soil for four generations is not my adversary merely because our incentives sometimes point in different directions, he is, more usefully, a man who knows things about this land that no survey I could commission would ever tell me, where the water actually sits after heavy rain regardless of what the maps say, which hedgerow the barn owls actually use versus the one the planning document assumed they would prefer. We talked for an hour about the new agri-environment scheme, which the climate reporting from further afield suggests is part of a wider and genuinely encouraging pattern, paying farmers not merely to produce less but to actively steward more, hedgerows, wet corners, strips left long for the insects, and he was cautiously interested, which from this particular farmer is roughly the equivalent of another man’s standing ovation.
Evening at the Hide
Closed the day at the bird hide with a flask of something warm and the light doing its long golden collapse over the reed beds, a heron, possibly the same heron, possibly a different heron entirely stealing the first one’s excellent posture, standing in the exact spot where the ditch narrows and the fish, per long observation, get careless. The wider conservation writing I follow internationally often frames these small local victories against the vast planetary losses, and rightly so, the arithmetic of biodiversity loss globally is genuinely dire and I will not pretend otherwise in this diary or anywhere else, but I have come to believe that the small victories are not a distraction from the large grief, they are the only sustainable fuel for continuing to face it, one returned otter at a time, one patient farmer at a time, one heron who has, this evening, finally caught something.
Filed this account for the archive at The London Prat, whose editors indulge my long walks and longer sentences with more grace than the subject strictly deserves, and I remain, as ever, grateful for a readership willing to stand still with me at the edge of a ditch for the length of an entire diary entry, waiting, as the heron waits, for something worth the patience.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk