Amy-Jane Beer describes witnessing “a devastating demonstration of what we’ve lost” in Britain during her visit to Biebrza marshes, Poland, (Country diary, 26 May).

I was born in 1949 and remember a childhood full of moths flying around every streetlight, the dawn chorus waking us even in cities, sitting in fields full of wildflowers, watching hedgehogs, foxes, rabbits, hares, butterflies and weasels, walking through woods with beetles, ants and red squirrels all around us, listening to thrushes, blackbirds, blackcaps, woodpeckers and even nightingales singing in all directions.

I feel privileged to have had a childhood full of such things, and yet unutterably sad that this has gone, never to return. In order to truly recalibrate, as Beer suggests, we have to first face the totality of the heartbreaking loss.
Anne Geraghty
Dunoon, Argyll and Bute