Three months??

Good news and bad news

COVID has made it an interesting few months. Good news that I stayed very busy throughout, bad news that I was too busy to work on the blog at all, but good news that keeping busy has finally allowed me to replace a stolen camera.

I had free time to get out to Echo Mountain today - not even the whole thing, as I had a morning Zoom call, but a little bit of rain had brought out some good targets for the new camera:

Slugs!

. . . and a snail. I almost struck out on snails, but did find one near the end. I started this post thinking "Certainly. . . certainly I'll be able to identify my little mollusk friends from the pictures today. . ." Here's hoping.

This will serve as my guide.  It's for Oregon, which should be fine, right...?  And it's set up like a dichotomous key for the most part.

1. 

This. . . is a slug

That was question 1:  Shell or no shell (NO)

Question 2: Where's the pneumostome placed on the mantle:  Huh?

Oh! erm. . . on the front part.

Question 3: Ovoid tubercules and a caudal pore, or diamond shaped tubercules and no caudal pore?

Looking like the first one on Slug #1

This gets us to the roundback slugs: arions. Only one black one in the bunch: Arion hortensis, or a Garden Arion. Although, to be fair, they mention that there are many other species, and a dissection is needed to confirm. . . yaknow, that's not happening!  This was enough to identify it as an introduced species from Europe. I will likely enter it in as A. hortensis, but count no other black roundbacks as a new species. 

2. 

Arion sp?

Same answers here, but we end up with a slightly different color. It could be A. rufus, which is a red or chocolate arion, although this one sure seemed redder...

3.

Arion rufus - red arion

With some research, I might get 2 figured out, but I like the ID for 3.  I also liked watching him (her? both?) eat:

chomp, chomp chomp

4.

It's hard to see the pneumostoma on this one, but this turned out to be a banana slug. Turns out it is a variable species, because these other ones were banana slugs too:

Ariolimax columbianus - Banana Slugs!

The picture that helped here was this:

And then I had the one snail: 

Pacific Sideband Snail - Monadenia fidelis.

This was another native.

Off to work updating the list. I'm about 150 days in so I should be around 150 species to be "on pace" with all of this. There's definitely some wildflowers waiting for me! I got out on a hike near Rainier recently, although that is decidedly out of the 425!

Addendum:

This went into the yogurt at breakfast the other day. The blackberries are the better, native blackberries - Rubus ursinus, which I found ripe in a little patch. The smooshy ones are Thimbleberry, which is so delicious, but a little seedy. The round red ones are Wild Red Huckleberry, which are romantically my favorite local berry. And finally, the light blue/purple ones. . . Oregon Grape! Oregon Grape is not something where you'd eat a handful of them, but adding them to this mix was not unwelcome.

Trailing Blackberry! Sorry, but you'll have to find your own patch.