If you build it, they will come

Needing to plan a guided walk I headed out to a peatland restoration project site in May that our team had completed the year before. I was focused on the best route around the restoration work, looking at the bunds, dams and reprofiling, so inevitably I headed for the gullies. 

Walking around I was fully occupied with hunting for the best examples of sphagnum moss and other typical bog plants. I was asking myself the myriad of questions that the typical busy brain of all those involved in peatland restoration have about the work we care so much about. Where had the bunds and dams held back shallow pools? How was the turf looking in the reprofiled hag faces? Were the pegs still secure in the geotextile? Should we have added one more board to that timber dam? Had the cottongrass clump planting taken? 

Four spotted chaser pools Emma Stewart

As I explored the potential routes around the boggy landscape my questions and thoughts were forgotten however, as I became completely absorbed in what was playing out at the shallow pools in the gullies.  Right across the site the damselflies and dragonflies had arrived.

What started with me watching, amused, at one pool where four-spotted chasers were claiming territory, soon became me following a soap opera of the insect world across the whole site. 

Four spotted Chaser Thomas Plant

Before long I was eight-year-old me again, in the garden intensely watching the bumblebees and trying to identify them with my BBC Wildlife ID Guide to Bumblebees.  I forgot my worries about turf quality and instead allowed myself to feel the awe and wonder that only nature seems to deliver.  Large red damselflies were busy doing their thing, a bit more quietly it seemed than the brash four-spotted chasers.  Fluttering, fighting, patrolling, mating.  Do they care about reprofiling slope angle, or the height of the splashboard?  This was the endorsement that lifted my spirits and reminded me: nature is just waiting in the wings for us to provide the chance for it to come back.  

A dramatic common hawker – another species of dragonfly spotted at the site Joel Johnson

Over the rest of the summer we visited this site again a few times, though not with the intention to look at dragonflies and damselflies. But how could we not!  As the season progressed, we enjoyed watching common hawkers, black darters, and a wandering golden-ringed dragonfly which looked like an albatross out there on the bog, far away from where I am used to seeing them.

Where did all these dragonflies and damselflies come from?  How many will stay?  I don’t know, we’ll have to see.  I’m grateful I was given the chance to feel amazement and inspiration. To feel small out on the bog, out of the office. To be lifted out of the restoration questions and worries, and instead to have the privilege of watching nature as it flooded in.

We built it and they came.

*An ‘adaptation of a quote from the 1989 film ‘Field of Dreams’, which starred Kevin Costner!

This project is delivered through Cairngorms Peatland ACTION, and is also part of the Cairngorms National Park Authority’s Cairngorms 2030 programme.