Love and loss: who can separate them? Certainly, the human love for the non-human world has increased with every advance of destruction. Gloomy thoughts for a beautiful spring day: but gloom is the currency you deal in if you love the wild world. Cheap at the price, if you ask me.

The Romantics transformed our view of nature, making sacred groves of places that were once considered blasted wildernesses. The Romantics wouldn't have existed if there hadn't been dark satanic mills against which daffodils and nightingales could be set. Natural history - wildlife and nature, collecting and classifying - became a passion in the mid-19th century: the naturalist-parson, with his spud, his collecting-box and his dangerous views about Genesis was a product of the Industrial Revolution.

All of which brought me to Minsmere yesterday, seeking love, seeking loss. This is the RSPB's great cathedral and nature reserve a few miles away from me in Suffolk: a place of wet and wonderful wildness. Such places are rare, and getting rarer. But come, let's celebrate the beauty, not the rarity.

Colours, one blue for the sky - sky is always rather a feature in Suffolk - and another for the waters of Island Mere. After that, then yellow and green: green for the salad-basket lushness of the young reeds, growing up with their feet in the water, and yellow for the flags, yellower than the Sun.

(I have put that paragraph in for my old friend Ralph, who complains that I see the wild world like a cat: I don't notice anything unless it moves.)

Ah, but I'm quite good with my ears: a bittern booming in triplets and quads: a far-carrying, grunting hoot, the sound that wetland makes. The cash-register ping of bearded tits, dapper and sparky little birds that fizz through the reed-tops. All around the marching song of reed warblers, and the more free-form approach of sedge warblers. The minimalist “song” of reed bunting. And then, every few minutes, the incontinent, explosive contribution of Cetti's warbler. I may have mentioned this before, but I love this stuff.

No-wimp situation

But the sky was the thing. It was jumping with marsh harriers. A bird that we harried close to extinction now fills the Minsmere skies, cruising with that measured, lazy, flapping-is-for-wimps flight, holding the wings in that shallow vee, balancing on the wind over the reeds as Blondin balanced on his tightrope over the Niagara Falls.

One bird dropped into the reeds: another two got up: birds in profusion, birds once incomprehensibly rare. This sky would have been unimaginable in the 1950s and 60s: it was like a fantasy of what conservation might possibly do, if miracles were on the agenda.

This year there are 11 marsh harrier nests at Minsmere; four of them would have been within sight from the hide, had they not been tucked away in the reeds. The fact is that humans really can perform miracles of conservation. The fact is that our love for the wild world compels us to do so really quite often: and every time it happens we should celebrate.

We have saved special places, we have re-created special places. We now need to expand our view of what constitutes a special place: we need to save not just nature reserves, but vast areas of the world in which a wild future is still possible. Conservation works: but only if we want it to.

Sprung spring

On, then, to the shore, swapping the freshwater landscape for the subtle and uncertain coast. Terns flying overhead, mixing their airy grace with a strident, chattering din: comfortably conforming with the law that says the prettiest birds make the least tuneful noises.

And the brief strip of land between marshland and beach was fizzing with butterflies: tiny shards of colour no bigger than a couple of fingernails: small coppers, apparently freshly polished, and common blues, like little chunks of sky making a brief visit to the Earth.

A good day, then. A more than good day: a day full of the best things. Love had, as usual, done its conquering: and love now, rather generously, impelled me towards a pint. I walked back around the wetland; blackcaps sang their fruity and flutey song as I strode out towards the Eel's Foot; swifts screamed overhead.

What would the world be, once bereft of wet and wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. If you notice a sudden improvement in my style here, rest assured that neither the words nor their sprung rhythm are my own.

The springing hope behind them, however, is all mine: and it is shared by anyone who walks in Minsmere for a while.

I didn't have the place to myself. Minsmere is something you must share these days. That's because many people love wildness and wet, and they come here in their droves to seek it. We humans have a deep need for all such wet and wild places. And the rarer they get, the more we need them.

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