Get ready for a glimmer
By Rachel Shaw
Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust
Last year I was driving to the coast idling, listening to the radio on the day that the Oxford English Dictionary announced their word of the year.
It was a new word for me but apparently is well-known to the younger Tik-Tok generation.
The word was ‘rizz’. It is possibly a shortened form of charisma and describes being good at flirting. It was the first time I’d heard the word and I don’t expect I’ll be using it anytime soon but my coastal visit did result in another new term that I will be using.
The sun had risen by the time I arrived but it was still dull and the air was filled with light drizzle. That kind of rain that feels like it’s not really raining but you end up getting soaked through. In the distance I could hear the child-like calls of grey seal pups.
A highlight of working for the Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust is being able to visit Donna Nook National Nature Reserve for work. It’s a difficult reserve to manage because of the sheer number of visitors. Fifty-five thousand people visit over the short period in November and December when the grey seals are pupping.
The Wildlife Trust wardens and their team of volunteers are incredibly dedicated – to the seals and to ensuring people stay safe and have an enjoyable visit. It was from one of the wardens that I picked up the word ‘flumping’ to describe the movement of a seal across a wet, sandy beach.
Seals are supreme swimmers but their movement on land, although it can be surprising fast, isn’t quite so fluid. They have a caterpillar-like movement that pulses through their bodies as they heave themselves across the sand. When you say flumping, you can almost hear the sound of the seal’s body on the wet sand. On that day, flumping became my word of 2023.
Visiting the seals at Donna Nook is a full-on wildlife experience. The highs and lows of seal life are laid bare in front of you. It’s an experience that’s more like a wildlife documentary than anything else I can think of. Most wildlife experiences aren’t like that. Often, they are brief glimpses as a deer disappears into trees or a bird flies out of view. But it’s these glimpses that lift the spirits that gave me my word of 2024 - ‘glimmer’.
A glimmer is a moment in nature that stops you in your tracks and makes you smile. I read about the use of the word in this way in a blog by Emma Chaplin from the Sussex Wildlife Trust. She described it as the opposite of trigger. Instead of resulting in a feeling of anger, worry or fear as a trigger can do, a glimmer sparks joy and calmness.
The early months of the year can be grey and cold. I grow impatient for spring and often find them the hardest months of the year.
To beat the winter blues, I will be looking for glimmers. Perhaps a blackbird flicking through leaves in search of food, the patterns of frost or sunlight breaking through clouds.
Your glimmers might to different to mine, but I hope you find your own.
