The sight of a kingfisher is a basic human right. You need to see one at least once if you wish to understand the planet we happen to live on. If you have not had the pleasure of seeing a ripping blue arrow skate the surface of the water, you have been deprived of something very important. It is not necessary to be a committed birdwatcher, you just need to be committed to such ideas as beauty and wonder and glory and a nice walk. And that impossible streak of iridescence brings all these things to a casual, chatting stroller in a fragment of a second.

They are special birds, not terribly rare, and certainly birds you are going to bump into from time to time if you spend much time around wetlands.

There are many different types of wetlands, but unsurprisingly water plays a big part in all of them. And in some of them, you may have an encounter with an azure flash: but in all of them, you have a glorious feeling of trespass.

Water is life. Wherever you find a good bit of fresh water, you find an awful lot of life. And since wetland is not part of the natural habitat of most humans, there is always a sense of surprise, of revelation.

The diversity of life in a back garden is part of our daily experience: the still greater biodiversity of a rich wetland is a special, Sunday-pilgrimage sort of experience. The grazing march from which a flock of lapwings suddenly arises, the reedbed in which a bittern makes his spooky, unnatural bellow, a pond in which newts lurk and passionately grapple, the open water with an endless raft of dozing duck, the river where I saw an otter slide gracefully into the water - wonders like this are within reach of us all. And so they should be.

Wetlands are essential to kingfishers: I see them as a basic right. But they are essential also to humans. They give us a feeling of mystery and beauty and reverence, a sense that life goes on in wild and strange forms, an understanding that the human way of living is not the only way, and, above all, the profound, important and thrilling revelation that we are not alone.

Times Recommends

• Bank charges hit us for being human
• Sorry, Father, thou still shalt not steal
• The shed where Santa’s failures go to die