"Be kind to your web-footed friends,

For a duck may be somebody's mother;

She lives all alone in a swamp,

Where it's always dark and damp."

Or does she live all alone in a marsh, where it’s always dark and harsh? Or a fen like an old moorhen? Or a bog? And are they all just wetlands? It is one of my life goals to figure out how marsh, swamp, fen, and bog differ. Hey, you have your bucket list, I have mine. I'm just a Riparian kind of girl.

My own personal swamp

Once I asked friend, Nancy, to explain all of this to me because she worked in the field. Now I understand the pained look she gave me. It turns out it all depends on whom you ask and where your little puddle is located. There are both professional (ecologist, hydrologist, etc.) and regional variations in terms. And there’s more than a little disagreement.

Feels like a swamp. . . .

I never should have opened this can of peat. Here I was worried about swamp vs. marsh vs. bog vs. fen. I had no idea I needed to add:

peatland    billabong    kettlehole    cataract    muskegs

seeps  swales   pocosins   hollows    mires

and more.

You’re on your own with those. For now, I’ll go with:

A wetland has saturated soil, flooded enough to create anaerobic conditions. Good for anaerobic plants, not so much for us aerobic types.

 Swamps have trees and are found in the southeast and Great Lakes areas. That explains why I grew up thinking swamp.

Marshes have thick vegetation in the form of grasses and cattails but not trees. So when the beaver took down the trees in my pond, did he turn it into a marsh? (See entry for March 30 & 31.)

A bog is peat-filled and has sphagnum moss and conifers. It’s acidic.

The fen is alkaline.

No wonder I had trouble. I’m sticking with swamp.

Oh, no–a slough-

What will I do?