365Caws is now in its 14th year of publication, and was originally intended to end after 365 days. It has sometimes been difficult for me to find new material, particularly during the winter months, but now as I enter my own twilight years, I cannot guarantee that I will be able to provide daily posts. It is my hope that along the way I may have inspired someone to a greater curiosity about the natural world. If so, I can rest, content in the knowledge that my work here has been done.
Thursday, October 12, 2023
Seeing The Small Things
Day 364: A friend suggested that I notice small things because I'm built closer to the ground, i.e., I'm barely five feet tall. While his hypothesis has a certain degree of merit, I firmly believe that it's because I've trained my eye to spot the unusual, regardless of its size. In this instance, I was down on my knees in wet leaf litter taking photos of Lemon Discos (a fungus) which, at a diameter of a millimeter, are pretty dang little. About a foot to the left, something on the same log peculiar registered. "Is that a freakin' SNAIL???" I said. Sure enough, I was being observed by the tiniest snail I have ever seen. Obviously, I can't offer an ID, but I suspect it is Allogon townsendiana, one of our most common snails here in the PNW. The shell, roughly 2 mm in diameter, clearly exhibited whorls, and I could see the little eye stalks probing the world of giants. This image was taken with a 4x macro filter, also on a macro setting.
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Nisqually-Mashel State Park,
tiny snail
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