The record, told as places rather than numbers

Prentice Creek ran open to the sky for most of a century — bright, warm and empty by the end of August. The lower bank belonged to two families who had never met each other and who both, it turned out, had been meaning to do something about it.

We fenced the reach, planted alder and willow in the rain, and then did the part nobody photographs: came back every summer to cut the reed canarygrass back off the whips. Some years we replaced more than we planted.

Then one winter the canopy met over the water. The volunteers who read that reach noticed it in the numbers before anyone noticed it with their eyes.

The Halloran place sits on a bench above the river, and from a developer's point of view it is the best ground in the valley. From the family's point of view it is where they cut hay, and they wanted it to still be that after they were gone.

The agreement took several winters. It limits subdivision and non-farm building, leaves the farming entirely alone, and includes a strip along the slough that we replanted the following spring.

The second generation signed an amendment last year to add the corner nobody had wanted to argue about the first time.

A fen is not a pretty thing to most eyes: waterlogged, hummocky, impossible to mow and useless for anything a spreadsheet recognises. This one had been drained twice and had refused, both times, to stay drained.

We worked with the owner to plug the old ditches and let it come back. It is now the coldest water entering that reach in August, and the first place on our list when somebody asks what a headwater actually looks like.

On the flats the argument is never about trees. It is about water in winter — whether a field holds it or sheds it, and what turns up when it does.

We worked with two farming families and a drainage district to hold water on ground that floods anyway, in a way that does not compromise the spring planting. The raptors found it before the paperwork was finished.