Stand on the bank at Ham Wall on a still February morning and you may hear it: a low, resonant boom carrying across the reeds. Thirty years ago that sound was close to vanishing from Britain. Today bitterns boom at sites across England and Wales, cranes nest in the Fens again, and little egrets and avocets — both absent as breeding birds within living memory — turn up on ordinary weekday visits.

None of it happened by accident. Wetland restoration is slow, unglamorous work involving sluices, pumps, grazing animals and a great deal of mud. But it works, and the UK now has a set of projects that show what can be achieved when water is put back where it belongs.

Why the wetlands went first

Lowland wetland was among the easiest habitat to remove. Drain a marsh and you have farmland. Dig the peat and you have fuel and compost. Cut the reedbed for thatch and, when the thatch trade faded, the remaining fragments dried out and scrubbed over. The Fens, the Somerset Levels, the Norfolk Broads and the wet grasslands of the Midlands were all whittled down until only small, isolated pieces remained.

That matters because herons, egrets and waders are particular. Bitterns need dense reed standing in shallow water full of fish and amphibians. Lapwings and redshanks need soft, worm-rich ground with short vegetation to nest on and pools nearby to feed chicks. Curlews want damp, tussocky grassland with insects at the surface. A tidy, drained field offers none of this, however pleasant it looks.

Reedbeds: the bittern's return

The bittern is the clearest success story. By the late 1990s, the UK population had fallen to a handful of booming males in East Anglia, with the species seemingly on the edge of disappearing as a breeding bird. Reedbed is not a self-sustaining habitat — leave it alone and it silts up, dries out and becomes willow scrub. It survives only where people manage it.

Recovery came from two directions. New reedbed was created on former arable land, and existing sites were managed with rotational cutting so that reed of different ages always remained. The detail that mattered most was water: clear shallow water with fish in it, and reed thick enough to hide in next to it. Bitterns now boom at sites from the Broads and the Fens to Somerset, Lancashire and beyond, and the birds have quietly spread to reedbeds that did not exist a generation ago.

Wet meadows and the waders that depend on them

Open wet grassland is harder to restore than it looks. RSPB Otmoor in Oxfordshire is a useful example: farmland converted back to wet meadow through raised water levels, shallow pools and careful grazing. Lapwing, redshank, snipe and curlew all gained a foothold there, along with wintering wildfowl.

The washlands of the Nene and the Ouse do similar work at a much bigger scale, holding water in spring and providing exactly the mix that breeding waders need. The ingredients are consistent across sites:

  • Soft, wet soil for probing invertebrates, achieved by keeping the water table high into spring.
  • Shallow, gently sloping pools and foot drains so chicks can feed at the edge without drowning.
  • A mosaic of grass heights — short swards for lapwing, taller tussocks for curlew and snipe.
  • Islands and undisturbed corners where nests survive, with no fence posts or trees to give predators a lookout.
  • Grazing or mowing to stop the site scrubbing over, usually with cattle or ponies rather than a machine.

Disturbance is the quiet killer. One dog off the lead in a nesting meadow in April can do more damage than a decade of poor weather.

From carrot fields to crane country

RSPB Lakenheath Fen is the classic example of arable land reverted to reedbed and fen. The transformation from intensively worked fields to wet reed took years of bunding, water control and planting, and the payoff has been substantial: bitterns, marsh harriers and, most remarkably, cranes, nesting again in a landscape that had lost them centuries earlier.

The Great Fen in Cambridgeshire takes the same idea and scales it up, joining two fragments of surviving fen with re-wetted farmland around them. Elsewhere, the RSPB's Wallasea Island project in Essex used excavated material from tunnelling to raise land levels and create lagoons, saltmarsh and mudflat from what had been low-grade farmland.

Somerset's Avalon Marshes: from peat diggings to egret country

The old peat workings on the Somerset Levels were, not so long ago, exhausted holes in the ground. Restored, they have become one of the richest wetland complexes in Britain. Ham Wall, Shapwick Heath and Westhay Moor now hold bitterns, cranes, marsh harriers and a growing population of great white egrets — a bird that was a genuine rarity here within living memory and now breeds in the area.

These reserves also show how wetland restoration pays in ways that have nothing to do with birds: storing carbon in rewetted peat, holding water back during floods, and filtering water before it reaches rivers. Birdwatching arguments are stronger when they come with a flooded village upstream in mind.

What the successful projects have in common

Different sites, different histories, similar recipe.

  1. Hydrology first. Get the water levels, sluices, bunds and pumps right. You cannot plant your way out of a dry site.
  2. Scale and connection. Bigger, joined-up wetlands support more birds than isolated scraps, and they let populations recover after bad years.
  3. Ongoing management. Cutting, grazing and scrub control are permanent jobs, not a one-off tidy-up.
  4. Patience. Reed takes years to establish, and invertebrate communities take longer still.
  5. Recording. WeBS counts, breeding bird surveys and volunteer recorders turn good intentions into evidence, and evidence into funding.
  6. Partnerships. Wildlife Trusts, the RSPB, WWT, the National Trust, the Environment Agency and local councils each hold a piece of the puzzle.

How to see the results for yourself

Spring is the time to go: reedbeds in April and May for bitterns and marsh harriers, wet meadows from March for displaying lapwing and redshank, and the Somerset Levels in late winter for cranes and egrets. Arrive early, take a scope if you have one, and head for a hide overlooking open water or wet grass rather than the woodland edge.

A few practical rules make the visit better for everyone. Stay on marked paths, keep dogs on short leads around wet grassland between March and July, and resist the urge to get closer for a photograph. Report what you see — BirdTrack, WeBS and county bird recorders all rely on ordinary visits for their data. If you want to do more, most of these reserves run volunteer work parties cutting reed, repairing boardwalks and counting birds, and membership subscriptions fund the pumps and sluice gates that keep it all wet.

Wetland restoration is not finished, and it is not guaranteed. Abstraction, pollution and drought all press on the same sites. But the last three decades have shown something useful indeed: give wading birds half a chance, and they will take it.

Photo: chaiyananuwatmongkolchai / Pixabay