The flowers arrive the day after the vote and the administrator assumes, briefly, a funeral
Thursday. Rain all day, the good steady kind that the polder actually wants rather than the violent kind we have been getting more of these last summers, and I spent the morning indoors for once, at the desk, catching up on the international conservation press with the specific guilty pleasure of a field naturalist granted an unexpected day of paperwork weather. There is a piece from Mongabay’s coverage of a reforestation effort on another continent entirely that made me put down my coffee and simply sit with it a while, the numbers involved, the scale of what is being attempted, and I thought, not for the first time, how strange it is to feel simultaneously humbled by the scale of other people’s ambition and quietly proud of the small, unglamorous ditch-work that constitutes my own entire professional life.
My own contribution to the planet’s total inventory of good news this week is considerably smaller in scale and, I would argue, no less important for it, the water board has finally, after three years of committee meetings that tested every reserve of patience I possess, agreed to adjust the summer water levels on the eastern section of the reserve, which sounds, written plainly like that, like the dullest possible sentence a diary could contain, and is in fact the single most consequential piece of news for the black-tailed godwits that will attempt to nest there next spring, because water level, more than almost any other single variable, determines whether a wader chick survives its first fortnight or does not.
The Committee, Properly Described
I want to record, for anyone who imagines conservation work as mostly standing in fields being moved by nature, that this particular victory took eleven separate meetings, four of them with an agricultural representative who spent the first six meetings convinced that adjusted water levels constituted a personal insult to his profession, and two of them with a water board engineer who kept, with genuine and admirable patience, explaining the same hydrological constraint in slightly different words each time until finally, at meeting nine, something clicked for everyone in the room simultaneously and the argument that had consumed three years dissolved in about four minutes flat, the way these things sometimes do, all at once after not at all for the longest time. The wider climate journalism covering environmental policy internationally rarely captures this texture, the sheer accumulated tedium that precedes almost every genuine improvement, and I think this is a failure of the storytelling more than a failure of the work, because the eleven meetings are, in their unglamorous way, exactly as important as the otter.
The agricultural representative, incidentally, sent flowers to the reserve office the day after the vote passed, an act so unexpected that our administrator initially assumed they were for a funeral, and I have decided to interpret this gesture as the closest thing to an apology this particular man is temperamentally capable of offering, which I accept in full, gladly, no further negotiation required, because a man who fought you honestly for three years and then sends flowers is a man worth having on your side of the next argument, whenever it inevitably arrives.
The Godwits, In Advance
I walked the eastern section this evening despite the rain, boots ruined, entirely worth it, to look at ground that will, come April, hopefully hold nests I cannot yet see and chicks I cannot yet count, and there is a particular kind of hope involved in standing in an empty wet field imagining the birds that have not arrived yet, a hope that the international campaigning organizations rarely have the patience for, being necessarily focused on the urgent and the immediate, but which I think is the actual emotional register conservation work runs on most of the time, not crisis, not triumph, but this quieter thing, standing in the rain, trusting the water level, waiting for April.
Filed with the archive at The London Prat, boots drying by the stove as I write this, the rain still going outside with the specific patience of weather that has nowhere else to be, and I find I have nothing more urgent to add tonight than this, that eleven meetings and three years and one bouquet of unexplained flowers produced, in the end, a wetter field for a bird that has not yet arrived, and I would not trade that outcome for anything faster. My colleague, the one who wrote eindelijk about the otter last week, texted this evening asking whether the godwit field news counted as a second eindelijk in the same fortnight, and I told him I was rationing the word carefully, one triumphant Dutch adverb per month being, in my professional estimation, the correct dosage to avoid diminishing its power, and he agreed, though I suspect only because he was already halfway out the door to check his own camera traps, otters apparently being contagious this season, spreading not just through the culverts but through the entire correspondence of everyone who studies them. The rain has not let up since morning, and I find I do not mind, it is exactly the rain the eastern section needs before I can properly say the water levels are holding as promised rather than merely as scheduled, and there is a difference between those two things that only becomes visible after a week like this one, tested, not merely announced.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk