One of the great underrated pleasures of the wild world is not seeing things. That is to say, not seeing animals, but knowing that they are there, or have been there. It is like being told a secret. I had a triple dose of it this week, mostly from the back of a horse, which always gives things an added vividness.

The first secret took the form of the elegant double-almond tracks of red deer. They don't show themselves much, these big creatures, rightly thinking it best to be discreet and to keep out of sight of humans. I was on a bridleway that runs by a small copse. Deer like places like this to lay up in during the day, before they go crop-raiding at night.

I have seen them at it, from this very wood, much to the alarm of my horse, who wanted nothing to do with them, and wouldn't approach any nearer, not listening to my explanation that we were all herbivores together. I saw no deer this time, but these secretive animals can't erase their own footprints and they looked colossal, as they were on soft mud, which makes every mincing passer-by look like a monster to those that follow.

I also found deer prints at a second scrap of woodland, smaller, and solitary. This was almost certainly a muntjac, since I have seen and heard them in this place. Muntjac are exoticisms; they came originally from China, going feral after getting out of places such as Woburn. They bark like dogs, a startling sound in the English countryside.

Then on a dog-walk I came across a series of small, enigmatic holes - conical pits that you could get a couple of fingers into, two or three inches deep and going into the ground at about 45 degrees.

This rather excited me: it looked like the work of badgers. These snuffle-pits are an aspect of badger life, yet the nearest known population is a couple of miles off.

Friends from the Suffolk Wildlife Trust have pursed their lips over the same area, and said that the previous signs that I had found were equivocal - but if there weren't badgers here, they didn't know what they were missing. So I looked for further clues, such as a white hair from that stripey head - but no luck.

Try again. But these clues fascinate me, these sudden revelations of the secret life of the countryside, the life that goes on all the time below the level of our awareness. The dog sniffed and sniffed. She knew, but she wasn't letting on.

Commas not at a full stop

I missed much of the English summer, being in China for the Olympic Games, and came back to find people complaining about the shortage of butterflies. This week they have been trying to make up for lost time.

I hadn't seen a comma all year, now I am seeing them all over the place. Commas are favourites of mine - well, all butterflies are favourites as they give you a free and unapologetic burst of beauty and colour. It seems as if a butterfly has no function other than to be beautiful, and that is more or less the biological truth of it, for butterflies are mainly about sex and its inevitable consequences. They deal with other, more sordid aspects of life when they are caterpillars.

Commas are like dabs of orange marmalade, easy to pick out because they are the only butterflies you see with ragged edges to their wings. When they fold their wings they vanish and turn into dead leaves. Comma is too common a piece of punctuation for them; they'd be better as one of my much-favoured colons: but alas, the name had already been appropriated by another aspect of life.

Slow leap forward

Save the snails! I am delighted to announce that there is now legal protection for the lesser whirlpool ramshorn snail. This was announced this week by Joan Ruddock, the Minister for Wildlife. It is a great leap forward for snailkind, and shares the glory of this announcement with the pool frog and Fisher's estuarine moth.

So if you had any thoughts of killing, injuring, disturbing, owning, selling or destroying the resting places and breeding places of this snail, think again: you'd be breaking the law.

The snail is a local speciality. You can find them in Suffolk, notably at Carlton Marshes, near Lowestoft. They are tiny aquatic creatures; the flattened spiral of their shell is seldom more than 5mm in diameter. They also live in a few other places in Suffolk, Norfolk and Sussex.

It is good to learn that a creature of which I have never heard, and will probably never knowingly see, is being afforded legal protection.

Conservation is a vast and difficult subject, and it involves saving everything, not just the big sexy things that look good on posters.

What is more, this vital fact is recognised in law. The snail police will come nee-nawing out to come and get you if you raise so much as a finger against the lesser whirlpool ramshorn snail.

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