local habitats – Forests of Memory. Forests of Learning. Forests for Life.

Out in the long grass of August, where the sun presses its heat into the soil like a branding iron and the wind moves with the low groan of age, Saskatchewan’s wetlands are still doing their quiet work.

They’ve done it for centuries — long before we gave names to their function, long before we cut fences through the marsh, or tried to drain their bellies for crops and cattle. And still, they stay. Not for us, exactly, but with us.

This year, from August 9 to 17, Saskatchewan marks the third annual Wetlands Appreciation Week, carrying the theme: Thriving Together: Wetlands and Communities — a phrase that rings both as a hope and a reminder.

Mallard Ducks Chappell Marsh. West Swale Wetlands Richard St. Barbe Baker Afforestation Area. Saskatoon, SK, CA

Red Winged Blackbird. Chappell Marsh. West Swale Wetlands. Richard St. Barbe Baker Afforestation Area. Saskatoon, SK, CA

A Landscape of Memory

Consider the West Swale, where the bones of ancient ice carved their story into the land. What we now call a wetland — rich with cattail, bulrush, muskrat, and frog-song — was once a glacial spillway. A restless, roaring channel creating Yorath Island, born from meltwater in the last ice age. That ghost river’s path now hosts Chappell Marsh, a jewel in the crown of the Swale. It is a place where time seems suspended in reed and reflection, and the land’s memory lies just beneath the surface.

Wetlands like this one are more than soggy ground. They’re lungs. They’re sponges. They’re cradle and coffin for countless species. And in a time when climate’s heartbeat grows erratic, these places are also something else — carbon vaults.

The Burden They Carry

Scientists will tell you that wetlands sequester carbon — that they hold it close in deep, anaerobic soils, preventing its release into the warming sky. But the way a farmer in the Qu’Appelle Valley might say it is this: “They soak up more than water.” They soak up heat, drought, and hunger. They shelter birds on thousand-mile migrations and buffer towns from spring floods that no one expected.

But what they give, they do not give without limit.

For every wetland that disappears under gravel or concrete or corrugated pipe, a thread unravels in the cloth of community. Not just for the waterfowl or salamanders or insects that lose a home, but for us — the people who live by water without noticing how it holds us upright.

A Quiet Celebration

So what does it mean to celebrate something that asks nothing for itself?

During Wetlands Appreciation Week, across Saskatchewan, please walk around a wetlands, download iNaturalist and Merlin and take part in citizen science efforts, and moments of shared learning. Communities will come together to listen — not to speeches, necessarily, but to the low thrum of the dragonfly, the dry rustle of sedge, the plop of a frog startled by a passing footstep. Children may build bug hotels. Elders may share stories of when beaver dams meant trouble, or salvation. All of it, a small way of saying: we’re still here. We still see you.

Thriving, Together

The wetlands of Saskatchewan don’t scream. They don’t split open the ground like wildfire or send towering clouds to warn us of their power. Instead, they keep holding on — thick with duckweed, water lilies, and the cool breath of patience.

And if we are to thrive together, as this year’s theme reminds us, then we must not look away from the places that ask so little and give so much. We must remember that resilience is quiet, and that the land remembers everything — the spillways, the droughts, the glacial whisper, and whether we chose to notice.

So go. Walk into the marsh. Watch the heron lift its slow wings into the heat. Breathe. And say thank you — softly, so the cattails can carry it.

Addresses:

Part SE 23-36-6 – Richard St. Barbe Baker Afforestation Area – 241 Township Road 362-A

Part SE 23-36-6 – SW Off-Leash Recreation Area (Richard St. Barbe Baker Afforestation Area ) – 355 Township Road 362-A

S ½ 22-36-6 Richard St. Barbe Baker Afforestation Area (West of SW OLRA) – 467 Township Road 362-A

NE 21-36-6 “George Genereux” Afforestation Area – 133 Range Road 3063

Wikimapia Map: type in Richard St. Barbe Baker Afforestation Area

Google Maps South West Off Leash area location pin at parking lot

Web page: https://stbarbebaker.wordpress.com

Where is the Richard St. Barbe Baker Afforestation Area? with map

Where is the George Genereux Urban Regional Park (Afforestation Area)?with map

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