Perceptive readers of the Diary, performing their acts of perception, will have perceived my fascination with snails.
It's possibly the only thing I have in common with Charles Darwin -- one of whose children asked the above question of one of his classmates on the first day of school.
Except that Darwin's interest did not run to causing them heart attacks via coffee grounds, feeding them to The Duck, or sending them thus on to the asphalt:
Now, after a night of unseasonable heavy rain -- I tried adding curry but it dissolved -- I'm led to contemplating the strangeness of this creature all over again.A brief inspection of Le Jardin de Sledge this dawn showed the little buggers making their long vertical trips up all sorts of surfaces.
All sorts ... but not all.
They seem to be able to select those climbs that lead to something rewarding: the bird bath, the water tank, the plant pots, long stems leading (eventually) to foliage.
Now how the ferk do they know what's at the top?
(I hear the strict Wittgensteinians objecting to any sentence in which the subject "snail" is predicated by "to know".)
Take the bird bath: no way a Powerful Owl could see the water in the bowl from underneath.
From a snail's-eye view, it's just another bit of concrete like the hundreds of others around the place.
Can they smell the water, the foliage?
Or do snails have some strange sense unknown to humankind?
I shall report back after further malacological-coenological studies.
For obvious reasons, this may take a while.
Sledge
