If you’ve got a garden or a flowerbed it’s always fun to leave some boards lying around on the ground. Come back in a week or so and you’ll discover some of the organisms that live in your garden but perhaps have never seen before under this makeshift shelter. A warning to the squeamish – you may not like what …
Snails and Slugs
Marvelous Mudflat Snails
A couple of weekends ago we enjoyed a sunny trip down island to Rathtrevor Beach Provincial Park. This BC Park is a fantastic place for kids and in the winter time the number of people using the trails and beaches are few(er) – note that on a sunny day there are still plenty of people out enjoying the park. The …
Giant Gardenslug
This Giant Gardenslug (Limax maximus) was moving so quickly it was a challenge to get a decent photograph. Slugs are notoriously hard to photograph – the challenge is to have enough depth of field (area of the image in focus) that both the near eye spot and the body are sharp and crisp. Since slugs are often prefer to avoid …
Slug Name Dropping
Slugs are always interesting to watch and once you’ve mastered the large obvious ones like the Banana Slug and the Chocolate Arion it’s time to develop one’s observation skill a little and try to figure out the smaller native and non-native slugs that can be found in British Columbia. Two good (but sufficiently challenging) slugs for the beginner are the …
Two Taildroppers
A Yellow-bordered Taildropper (Prophysaon foliolatum) peering over the edge of the boardwalk. Sometimes when you least expect it you find something that is a little bit different. Such was the case during a recent guided walk on the South Beach Trail in Pacific Rim National Park Reserve when I found two different taildroppers. Usually I expect to find Banana Slugs …
Purple Olive Snails at Radar Hill Beach
The sandy expanse of Radar Hill Beach is good habitat for Purple Olive Snails (Olivella biplicata). With the good low tides this week my objective on my days off was to explore some beaches that I hadn’t visited before. One such destination was Radar Hill Beach in Pacific Rim National Park Reserve. Access to this remote beach is by an …
Pacific Sideband Snails
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve noticed Pacific Sideband (Monadenia fidelis) snails crossing the trails that I’ve been walking at Miracle Beach Provincial Park and at Oyster River Nature Park on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. This large native British Columbian snail is comparable in size (a little larger) to the Grovesnails (Cepaea nemoralis), that I saw along the Courtenay …
Glorious Grovesnails
A solitary Grovesnail (Cepaea nemoralis) makes its way along a fence rail. On my regular afternoon walk to the Courtenay Airpark I noticed a rout of close to two dozen snails on the rail of a cement fence near the Old House Restaurant. The snails were Grovesnails (Cepaea nemoralis), a common garden snail introduced to North America from Europe. The …
Slug’s Eye View
I took Clara and Alden for a strolling adventure in Seal Bay Regional Park today – a complete circuit around the main swamp starting and ending at the Hardy Road parking area. Most of the trail was pretty good except for the bit between the swamp and the main trail between Hardy Road and Bates Road. The swamp is filling …
Searching for the Robust Lancetooth
We’ve been keeping an eye out for some of the bigger snails during our forest walks this week. They’re much easier to identify than some of the smaller ones that we’ve discovered underneath paving stones and wood. This week we found the shell of a Robust Lancetooth (Haplotrema vancouverense). The robust lancetooth is a fairly common large snail in deciduous …