Hide and seek with reptiles and other riverside creatures

Airedale, West Yorkshire Under one board are two young lizards, one buff, one a dramatic charcoal-grey; under another a dark-green frog

It's all gone a bit quiet down by the river. The breeding season has petered out, and by and large the birds have retired from public life: to moult, to regrow, to regroup. It's a drab, warm morning. One of the kingfishers hunches over the streaming shallows. A young bullfinch mopes in the low branches of an ash. Damp late-summer greenery - ferns, goosegrass, rosebay willowherb - chokes the pathways.

Here and there, in the riverside woodland, the warden has laid down boards of planking for young adventurers to peer beneath. Typically there'll be worms and snails, sage-green slugs and hectic centipedes, perhaps a wood mouse's midden of neatly nibbled cherry pits.