Back in September I discovered some very small snails underneath a paving stone in our garden when flipping rocks for International Rock Flipping Day. This past week I’ve found a couple more small snails that I’ve photographed but have been unable to identify.

The snail pictured above and below was in a rotting stump alongside the One Spot Trail in Courtenay. It’s hard to get and idea of the size but think about the spaces between the veins in the leaf that it is crawling across. The snail is about 3mm in width!

It’s been really interesting looking for these snails (they’re about 3mm to 10mm in width) and challenging to photograph them. I think that a little patience and a hand lens would be helpful to figure them out but with the time pressure that a two year old creates this is pretty hard to do without taking them home for further study. Still, it is fun to find them and often I discover other interesting things in the process.

The snail below was beneath an old board lying on the ground. It looks similar to the one that I photographed under the paving stone but I didn’t smell this one to see if it was a Garlic Glass-snail. Fortunately, I know where it lives and can return to visit it!

Learn more about snails in BC by reading Jocie’s blog post On the Trail of a Snail.