Ripon, North Yorkshire: The sun-dappled verges edged with willowherbs and brambles are good places for snails and this new batch of predators

“Mate, the state of you.” Peter Cooper, an ecologist and species reintroduction specialist, is performing a delicate operation, using the tip of a fine paintbrush to extract a succession of tiny creatures from the shell whorls of a deceased and deliquescing snail on which they are feasting. He transfers them to a scrap of cellulose foam on which several others already cling. The last one out, presumably the first in, needs some extra cleaning. “Oh my, look at you … fully lost in the sauce.”

The gooey gourmands are barely 5mm long, with dark grey, segmented bodies and tiny legs. They look a little like ladybird larvae, but they are in fact a creature not seen in this part of Yorkshire for 100 years, but described by the bohemian rambler and writer Edmund Bogg when he passed this way in 1909 as “wont to hang out their fieldstar lamps … as if lit by the hands of fairy folk”.