I shall be spending World Wetlands Day in one of the World's most famous wetlands - Doñana, in southern Spain.  It is a place I know well and love, and it will be good to get back.  I was last there in spring 2014, on two occasions. In the March Julian Rush and I went there to make a programme for BBC Radio 4's Costing the Earth.  A month later I was back with The Observer's Robin McKie.

It was part of an EU-wide effort to persuade governments of the vital value of wild places and the European legislation that protects them.  The EU Birds and Habitats Directives had been under attack for some time, with developers and some governments regarrding them as a barrier to economic progress.  The campaign demonstrated how false this idea was, and just before Christmas the UK government, which had previously been particularly negative towards the Directives, announced that it was not going to push for them to be weakened.

Another pillar of international protection is the Ramsar Convention, a global agreement focusing on wetlands.  Every year on 2 February, the anniversary of its adoption in 1971, the Convention secretariat organises World Wetlands Day.

Unfortunately, wetlands are often viewed as wasteland, and more than 64% of the world’s wetlands have disappeared since 1900.  Much of the remaining resource is suffering neglect and mismanagement.  Yet livelihoods from fishing, rice farming, tourism and water provision all depend on wetlands.  They host a huge variety of life, protect our coastlines, provide natural sponges against river flooding, and store carbon dioxide to regulate climate change.

Wetlands for our Future: Sustainable Livelihoods is the theme for World Wetlands Day in 2016. The aim is to demonstrate the vital role of wetlands for the future of humanity and specifically their relevance towards achieving the new Sustainable Development Goals.

An international poetry competition opens tomorrow, 10 January and closes on 24 January.  Entries will be judged by English-born Tasmanian poet Sarah Day whose most recent collection Tempo has been shortlisted for the Australian Prime Minister's Literary Awards.  There is a prize of AUS$700 and AUS$100 for shortlisted entries.

​Click the button for rules and other details. Note the deadline is midnight on 24th Melbourne time - 11 hours ahead of GMT.

The reason for my visit to Doñana next month is to kick off a new project.  Between February and June 2016 I will be tracking the arrival of spring in Europe, from the Mediterranean to the Arctic.  Starting on the North African coast, and visiting some of the most interesting wild places in Spain, France, the UK, Sweden, Finland and Norway, I will report back on what I find on www.thelongspring.com.
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I’ll be describing wildlife, places, traditions, culture and issues as I look for signs of the coming of spring. I will be finding out how spring is marked by people in the areas I visit, investigating people’s connection to their natural environment and seeing how this is changing.

I'll also use the blog to report on news from elsewhere, such as webcams from special places as the new season gets underway.  

The Long Spring is also the working title of my forthcoming book, provisionally scheduled for publication in early 2018, by Bloomsbury.

For the past two years I have been privileged to work in one of the great wetland areas of the UK - the stunning North Norfolk Coast. During my time working with RSPB colleagues based at the Snettisham and Titchwell nature reserves I have witnessed the greatest tidal surge in living memory, marveled at spectacular flights of massed waders and geese, been excited by the appearance of rare visitors, and delighted in the commonplace.

Despite thirty years in a wide variety of conservation roles, from fundraising to international advocacy, I had never worked at the sharp end, on the ground.  So I jumped at the opportunity to be seconded to work at two of our top wetland nature reserves.

World Wetlands Day, on 2 February each year, unites all such places around the world.  It is a reminder that wetlands are among the most beautiful, vital and threatened places.  My secondment comes to an end in two months’ time and I have been reflecting on a host of memories.  I have a favourite, and it’s a simple one that could easily have passed me by on any other day:

A month later, the air over Titchwell was again the stage for a balletic battle, but this one an epic contest between two perfectly matched protagonists:

The Coto Doñana in Andalucía is where nature and culture hybridise like nowhere else I know.   This Saturday I shall be in Birmingham to speak at the RSPB’s AGM on Doñana:  Portrait of a Wilderness. 

The main point of the talk will be to illustrate the value of EU-level cooperation, supported by EU law, in conserving Europe’s most precious places.  This in the face of an onslaught by the UK Government, the new EU Commission and other short-term interests who are committed to watering down the protection afforded by current legislation.

It’s a subject I covered earlier this year in an episode of BBC Radio 4’s Costing the Earth, which you can hear by clicking the button:

For Costing the Earth, reporter Julian Rush and I met up in the village of El Rocío, on the edge of Doñana’s vast marshes, before driving off into the wilderness.  We wanted to see how Doñana had fared sixteen years since we last met there, when Julian was reporting for Channel 4 TV.

Back then, Doñana, indeed all Spain, was reeling from the country’s worst environmental catastrophe.  A reservoir containing highly toxic mining waste had collapsed, spilling 5 million cubic metres of lead, arsenic and cadmium-laden mud and acid water.  A tsunami of poison flowed into the River Guadiamar, one of the main sources of water for the marshes of Doñana, which lay some 45 kilometres downstream.

En route, the wave of mud and acid killed everything in the river, and spread over 4,500 hectares of farmland, which will never again produce food.  It flooded some of the most important bird habitat, killing all aquatic life and contaminating soils.  Plants absorbed the heavy metals, becoming toxic to anything that fed on them.

The full story, and its aftermath, is related in Costing the Earth.  What proved to be a short-term disaster had its silver lining.  With considerable EU financial support, the pollution was cleaned up.  The contaminated farmland was allowed to rewild and has become a green corridor linking Doñana with the Sierra Morena to the north, and hopefully, one day reuniting the fragmented Iberian lynx population.

On Saturday, I will touch only briefly on the other Doñana: the Doñana of music, dance and pilgrimage.  So this is my chance to celebrate the cradle of flamenco;  and how fitting that this is also the Spanish name for one of Doñana’s great symbols, the flamingo. 

Etymologists cannot agree on whether the bird was named after the gypsy dances recalled in its strutting, head-and-wing flicking display; or the other way round.  What is in no doubt, is that the marshes of Doñana and the surrounding provinces of Huelva, Seville and Cádiz, is where flamenco and flamencos are most at home.

During my thirty-odd visits to Doñana, over the last 25 years, I have been unable to disentangle my sense of the landscape, its smells, its sounds, its birds, its coarseness, its rhythms, natural and otherwise, its troubles and its blessings.  Nor, in the lyrics to the Fandangos de Huelva, the Sevillanas, the Soleás and all the other Andalucian song styles, does any such separation exist.

For this reason, re-reading my birdwatching notebooks covering a quarter century of visits, is to smell the tang of eucalyptus and to hear the insistent clapping – palmas -  of flamenco:

Walking back to the hotel...

....to the piping scops and the k’tocking red-necked nightjar
and half-asleep coots in the black marshes
and clapping.... clapping....

The cante jondo approaches the rhythm of the birds and the natural music of the black poplar and the waves. It is a rare example of primitive song, the oldest of all Europe, where the ruins of history, the lyrical fragment eaten by the sand, appear live like the first morning of its life.  Federico Garcia Lorca 1931

On a cold November morning in the late 1970s a small group of us assembled on the shores of Morecambe Bay, near the village of Hest Bank.  We were there to meet the high tide wader roost, a host of oystercatchers and ringed plovers, in order to net them, ring them and release them as part of a long-term research project into long distance migration.

One of my fellow ornithologists was Edward Cowie, then Associate Professor of Composition at the University of Lancaster, where I had just enrolled as an undergraduate in biology.

From then until Edward’s move to take up an academic post in Australia in 1983, we would encounter each other at bird club meetings, in the field and at concerts.  Our conversations were most often about birds, but sometimes about music.

As for Hest Bank, it was to be the inspiration for an early but already characteristic Cowie piece – an eponymous movement from his Gesangbuch, a cycle of virtuosic choral works written for the BBC Singers.  Cowie’s Hest Bank captures in sound a rippling, surging, swirling, murmuring, flowing and ebbing of vast flocks of knot, dunlin and other waders; of water, surf and flotsam; of light and of landscape.  

I caught up with Edward as he was preparing for a trip, with his partner, the artist Heather Cowie, to a very different wetland.  They are spending the rest of September in Botswana’s Okavango Delta, where Edward will be researching new pieces with the support of a Leverhulme Emeritus fellowship.  Surprisingly, it is Edward’s first visit to tropical Africa.

“One of the things I like about being a composer is it always takes me somewhere strange.  I don’t know how I will react but I know it will be the whole interlocking tapestry that will impress me:  the sky, the flatness, the wetness.”

He knows enough about what to expect to have decided how he intends to work.  One of the main outputs from the trip will be Okavango Nocturne.  It will be the second in a cycle of orchestral works with the overarching title Earth Music.  The first was Great Barrier Reef, commissioned by the BBC Proms and premiered there last year.

“I’ve heard that the Okavango has a very special night-time atmosphere, full of sound coming from millions of animals of all kinds.  I’ll be out there listening very carefully to a habitat that can’t be seen, only heard.”   Okavango Nocturne will be premiered in the 2015/16 season.

I remark that his search for some special magic in the Okavango is characteristic, something he has been doing for years in the wild places of the world.  He agrees and explains that in Australia he often spent long periods alone in wild areas, contemplating and exploring nature and the sonic and visual experiences it affords.  He describes an evening sitting at the edge of a cliff overlooking the King Valley in Victoria. 

“Just as the light finally dipped towards an inky darkness, several male lyrebirds began to sing in a series of interlocking but combative ensemble performances”.   He was captivated by the sounds, but also by the whole experience:  the changing light as dusk falls; tracing wisps of smoke that perforate the forest canopy, the valley landscape enclosing this world of sound and atmosphere.

The result of that experience was one of his best-loved pieces, Lyre Bird Motet (2003), written for the BBC Singers.  A return trip to Australia a few years ago led to a companion piece, Bell Bird Motet, premiered in 2011 by the BBC Singers at the festival Earth Music Bristol which Edward founded.  

For Edward, drawing is an integral part of music composition.  “I’ll be taking a manuscript book to note down the sounds that I hear, but the visual dimension is important – even in the dark.  Composition is for me ‘multi-sensing’ – I draw to capture shape, form, complexity versus simplicity, colour and ‘event.’  I add real musical notes in the drawings if I need to, and then start translating it all into the music."

Our conversation runs like a river in spate, with unexpected turns and splashes.  Suddenly we are discussing the recent discovery of the phenomenal song repertoire of the spiny lobster.  It turns out Edward is working on an Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio series called Singing Planet.  It’s a natural history of song “from crustaceans to the contemporary chorus.”

We return to the calmer waters of the Okavango and Edward reveals plans for another Botswana project - researching big cats for a piece for clarinet quintet.

“I recently got to know [British clarinettist] Julian Bliss and have been bowled over by his playing – it’s great to hear someone so young display a totally unmediated love of sound”  he enthuses, "and it turns out Julian is seriously keen on wildlife.  I’m writing a clarinet quintet for him, so I asked him what subject he’d like me to focus on and he immediately said ‘big cats’.  So the piece will be called Big Cats.

“I have millions of reasons to compose music, and they are mainly, if not totally, found within the way the natural world works.”

Laurence Rose