The Little Wye is a different river every month. In February it runs grey and swollen and belongs to goosanders. By June the shallows are warm enough to paddle and the air above them is thick with mayflies and screaming swifts. Walk the same stretch of bank twice a month for a year and you stop seeing "a river" and start seeing a calendar.

What follows is that calendar, worked through month by month: the birds, mammals, insects and plants most likely to be in front of you, and where to stand to have a decent chance of seeing them. Timings shift with the weather — a cold March can hold spring back a fortnight, a mild one can bring it forward — so read each entry as a window rather than a date.

January and February: The Quiet Months

Song is at its thinnest now, which makes it the best time of year for wildfowl and for tracks. Bare banks and low vegetation give up secrets that stay hidden in July.

On the water

Goosander and goldeneye are the prizes. The drake goosander is a long, pale, faintly reptilian bird that swims low and dives hard; females show a rusty head and a sharp white throat patch. Little grebes squeal from the backwaters, teal whistle, and wigeon graze flooded meadow grass after heavy rain. Grey herons stand so still in the shallows that you begin to doubt they are real.

In the margins

Otter spraint — dark, crumbly, faintly fishy — turns up on boulders and bridge ledges, often in the same spot week after week. After rain, mud at slipways and cattle crossings holds footprints: five toes, a broad pad, sometimes a drag mark from the tail. Redwing and fieldfare strip haws and rosehips from the hedges, and alder and hazel catkins open along the bank.

March and April: The Return

Everything speeds up. The first chiffchaff usually sings from the last week of March, a two-note chime like someone testing a doorbell. Willow warblers follow a fortnight later with a soft, falling flourish. Learn those two songs and you have cracked the hardest part of spring.

Sand martins reappear over the water and head for sandy banks, where kingfishers are also digging nest tunnels — look for a clean dark hole in a vertical face with a pale streak of droppings beneath. On the banks: kingcups in yellow clumps, willow catkins, wood anemone under the trees, and the first orange-tip and brimstone butterflies along sunny hedges.

Frogs spawn in the side ditches, toads in longer strings, and the shallow margins fill with tadpoles and small fish. Herons gather noisily at the heronry, obvious now while the trees are still bare.

May and June: The Loudest Weeks

If you visit only once a year, come now. Sedge warblers and whitethroats sing from the nettle beds, reed warblers chunter from the reeds, and the cuckoo calls across the meadow. Swifts arrive at the end of May and scream over the water in the evenings.

Under the surface, the mayfly hatch is the main event. On a still, warm evening in late May or June, watch the surface below a riffle: fish rise steadily, swallows and martins sweep low, and mayflies — upright wings, trailing tails — lift off in numbers. Water crowfoot flowers in white rafts in the current, and the first banded demoiselles flutter over the banks, metallic blue-black males chasing green females.

Watch for family life too: swan cygnets riding on a parent's back, ducklings in a ragged line, heron chicks clattering in the nest. At dusk, Daubenton's bats hawk low and straight over the water — stand still and you may hear the tick of their echolocation.

July and August: Heat and Low Water

Song fades as birds moult and skulk. This is the season for insects and for reading the riverbed. Dragonflies patrol the pools — emperor, brown hawker — while banded and beautiful demoiselles work the shaded stretches and red-eyed damselflies perch on lily pads.

On the banks, meadowsweet froths, purple loosestrife goes magenta, and Himalayan balsam opens pink hooded flowers that hum with bees. Levels drop and gravel shoals appear, good for finding otter footprints in drying mud and for watching young kingfishers learn to fish badly.

Swifts leave in early August, almost overnight. Sand martins gather over the shallows before they go. On the hottest afternoons, watch the deep pools rather than the riffles; in low flow, everything retreats to the cool water.

September and October: Movement

Passage birds trickle through — chiffchaffs, blackcaps, the odd wheatear on open gravel. After the first cold nights, redwings and fieldfares arrive from the north and strip the berry crop. Heron roosts become visible again as the leaves come down.

Rain changes everything. Once the river lifts, salmon and sea trout push upstream to the gravel shallows, sometimes showing as a roll or a splash in a pool you have walked past a hundred times. Look for fungus on old willows, sloes and haws in the hedges, and dewy webs strung across the nettles. Goosanders usually reappear in late October, which is as good a marker as any that winter has arrived.

November and December: Short Days, Big Flocks

Wildfowl build up again: goosander, goldeneye, wigeon, teal, tufted duck. Snipe and woodcock move into wet fields and soft ground, where they sit tight and burst out from under your feet. Cormorants dry their wings on the posts, and herons line the meadow after rain.

With the banks bare, otters are easier to find than at any other time — dawn and the last hour of light are best. Kingfishers sit on low branches over the water, and leafless alders show the cones and catkins that will feed finches through the winter. After a hard frost or snow, walk the margins early: tracks tell you exactly who came along the bank overnight.

Watching Well: Practical Notes

A few habits make more difference than any piece of kit.

• Go early or stay late. The first hour of light and the last hour before dark beat the middle of the day every time.
• Stand still for five minutes. Most animals are hiding because you were moving. Stop, and they come back out.
• Watch the edges. Most of the life here is in the first metre back from the water — under overhangs, in reed litter, among alder roots.
• Read the flow. Riffles are for insects and feeding fish, pools for holding fish and otter routes, eddies for drifting debris and the birds that pick through it.
• Keep dogs out of the bank in spring. Nest tunnels and burrows in vertical banks collapse easily, and disturbing protected species can be an offence.

Take river levels seriously, too. After heavy rain the Little Wye can rise fast, so don't wade deep water alone or cross a spate to reach a bank you fancy. Leave the bank as you found it: litter home, no cutting back vegetation for a better view, and keep a generous distance from any nest, burrow or young animal — if the adults are watching you, you are too close. Note what you see and when, even in a phone note. A record of the first swift or the first salmon of the year is genuinely useful, and it makes next year's walks richer.

Photo: Veronika_Andrews / Pixabay