I Just finished a terrific book called Following the Water by David Carroll. I’ve read all his books; he’s a New Hampshire-based naturalist who specializes in turtle ecology. That makes me smile, because there aren’t many animals that I like as much as turtles. Following the Water is a collection of reflections on his wanderings around the streams, ponds, forests and fields that surround his home. 

I’ve spent most of my career in the technology domain, telecom mostly, so I’m very familiar with the acronyms and unique terminology that every field creates for itself. For example, I don’t play bridge, but I love to read the bridge column in the newspaper, just because I don’t have the foggiest idea what they’re talking about. Here’s an example:

In today’s deal the situation in three no-trump is complicated by South’s desire to keep West off-lead. Declarer will have seven top tricks once he has knocked out the heart ace, so must find two more tricks from somewhere. Fortunately, there are lots of extra chances: the spade finesse, an additional heart trick, and an extra club winner or more. The key, though, is for South to combine his chances in the right order.

Say what? The spade finesse and an additional heart trick? I have no clue what the author’s talking about, but reading the column is like watching a linguistic train wreck. I can’t stop myself.

So, it’s no surprise that Carroll’s book has its own words that address the needs of the aquatic ecologist. As he describes the place where water and land meet to create complex ecosystems that each produce their own unique collection of living things, he draws on a poetic collection of words to describe the hidden world that he’s devoted so much of his life to. What is so interesting to me is that as I read his book, one mysterious word leads to another, causing me to spend way too much time in the dictionary. 

As we follow Carroll through a dense tangle of willows, he describes it as a carr. A carr, it seems, is a bog or a fen, where willow scrub has become well-established. That, of course, sent me back to the dictionary in search of bogs and fens (by the way, this was almost as much fun as actually getting muddy). A fen, it turns out, is one of six recognized types of wetland and one of two types of mire. The other is a bog. Fens tend to have neutral or alkaline waters, whereas bogs are acidic. A mire, by the way, sometimes called a quagmire, is the same as a peatland. Peatlands can be dry, but mires are always wet. Mires, by the way, are the same as a swamp, except that mires tend to be colonized by mosses and grasses, while swamps usually have a forest canopy over them.

Carroll also spends a lot of time describing vernal pools and the creatures that spawn in them. I love that term, vernal; it conjures something mysterious for me, a place of unknown creatures that rise from the depths at night. Think Dr. Seuss’ McElligot’s Pool. Anyway, vernal pools are temporary pools that provide habitat for specific species, although not fish. They tend to be temporary, and are often teeming with things like tadpoles, water striders and whirligig beetles. They’re called ‘vernal’ because they’re at their deepest in the spring (the word comes from the Latin, vernalis, the word for that season), and they’re typically found in low spots or depressions in grassland habitats.

Another word that comes up a lot is riparian. Riparian describes the transition zone that lies between the land and a river or stream that runs through it. Riparian areas are important, because they filter and purify water that runs off the land and enters the waterway. A biome, by the way, is a community of plants, animals or microorganisms that inhabit a particular climatic or geographic zone. So, a riverbank would be a riparian biome.

And what about the wetlands that Carroll refers to throughout the book? Well, a wetland is an area that’s eternally saturated with water, like the Everglades. They’re standalone environments, but they can also include swamps, marshes, bogs, mangroves, carrs, pocosins [puh-CO-sin], and varzea [VAR-zea].

By the way, because you’re dying to know, a pocosin is a palustrine [PAL-e-streen] wetland with deep, acidic peat soils, sometimes called a shrub bog. Palustrine, incidentally, comes from the Latin word palus, which means swamp. Palustrine environments include marshes, swamps, bogs, fens, tundra, and flood plains.

And since we mentioned it, a varzea is a seasonally-flooded woodland specific to Brazil’s Amazon rain forest. A marsh is a wetland dominated by herbaceous rather than woody plants – grasses, rushes and reeds, instead of shrubs and trees. It’s also a transition zone that’s marinated in stagnant, nutrient-rich water. By the way, swamps, like the Everglades, move water across their surfaces, while mires move water below the surface. Marsh plants tend to be submerged; mire plants are not.

Fens, swamps, mires and bogs: who would have thought there was so much diversity at the water’s edge.