This fictional creative piece allows he voice of Edna to talk about her beloved fenland in the context of 'shifting baseline syndrome'. It is the second in a series of 12 essays on 'Shifting baselines' looking at different ecosystems and how they have become depleted in living memory. They are written in dialect where possible to acknowledge the language around nature that is being lost concurrently with nature itself. You want to know what the fen was. Well. Sit you down, th

Dragonflies were mastering flight three hundred million years before the first bird. They hunt with incredible precision, live most of their lives unseen underwater, and one of them holds the record for the longest migration of any insect on earth. They are also a living verdict on the health of your water, and one of the very few wild wonders you can summon to your own patch by digging a simple pond with shallow margins and a few plants. A dragonfly hangs in the air at the e