At a snails pace

Une Escargatoire ou Surfeit

By Margaret Sheppard ( volunteer in the park orchard)

Found huddled together in the Orchard yesterday this escargatoire (and the French should know) of snails wasn't so much a nursery as an extremely large collection. Perhaps a surfeit of snails would be a good name. They were clustered together in a large bag of stones so had to be individually detached by hand. Fortunately I got to them before they got to our lovely orchard plants. I was so shocked by the sheer volume of the mass that I bagged them all up and took them home to weigh:

7 lb 7oz! And I'd already dealt with a few on site!

The collection of terrestrial pulmonate gastropod molluscs.

Michael Brown posts-

It has been raining a lot for weeks now, that steady fine drizzle that comes in from the sea and off Dartmoor. And now there are a lot of snails. I have been lifting my cascading aubretia on the garden walls and scraping them off with a dustpan to collect them – several at a time. They are everywhere, especially in my dahlias. The ones that escaped the dustpan fell to the floor and accidently ended up under foot.

I quite like snails. I have eaten them with garlic butter and they are good food for hedgehogs and blackbirds. But they are a nuisance; they eat the plants and leave slimy trails everywhere. But looking at them in the photo, I noticed how sleepy they look, have they been up all night galavanting?

Margaret, they would make great house pets, they aren’t noisy, can’t run away, they don't bark all night or rip your nice net curtains. You could keep them in your food waste bin at night and have them in an escargarium during the day where you could watch them. It would be very calming. You could charge people to come and be de-stressed.

Well Margaret, you haven't said what you did with them after you weighed them.

Will I be reading about a mass murder in the Teignmouth News?

Facts that you should know - The olfactory epithelia of terrestrial pulmonate gastropod molluscs have modified brush borders with long branching plasmatic processes and a spongy layer of cytoplasmic tubules which extend from the epithelial cells. !!!

But you probably already knew that.