Second verse, same as the first

After it rained a few days ago I went out to see what was taking advantage of all the extra moisture.  And of course, what I mostly found were...snails.

Snails eat plants, and eating plants is not particularly garden friendly. Unfortunately I've never seen a snail attacking Bermuda grass or poison ivy either one.  Even snails have their limits.

But, keeping in mind snails also feed birds and snakes and the occasional raccoon, I mostly leave them alone until and unless I see them in sufficient numbers to alarm. Given our ongoing run of droughty hot summers, this has not happened for quite a while.

Speaking of heat and drought, legend has it snails protected Buddha's head from the sun as he meditated during a particularly hot dry spell.  Can you imagine the powers of concentration it would take to ignore tolerate welcome snails forming a shady covering for your head? Yeah. Me, neither.

Out I went with my camera intending to capture images and then identify the types of snails to be found in these spaces.  You can guess the rest.  As it went with birds, and then butterflies, bees, and then moths, I did not find many photos of snails supposedly common to our area that seemed to neatly align with the ones I found.

This is not to say I am hosting any rare or new or previously undiscovered snails.  This is to say I spent a lot longer than I intended online, searching out snail information and images.  Most of what I found was centered around eradicating rather than identifying them.  Understandable, but not helpful.

So for what it is worth, here goes my highly unscientific taking-a-wild-stab-at-what-they-are lineup of usual suspects.  FIrst up? Several examples of some type of scrubsnails.

They are a lot more acrobatic than I imagined.

That smaller, slightly globose shelled snail to the top right side of the photo above, is a common brown garden snail (Cornu aspersum).  They like verbena and penstemon among other flowering plants.  The one on the far left?  It could be a color variant of the common brown or it might be something else. Honestly it beats the heck out of me.

Scrubsnail?  Maybe...

The following is potentially the remnant of some form of Rabdotus.  Or not...

Finally, and here is where I gratefully made a definite identification, the elongated cone shaped shells here in my "snail's graveyard" are a form of Rumina decollata, or the Decollate snail.  They were categorized as an exotic though I have them everywhere.  Or at least their leftovers.

They feed on other snails as well as plants and I ran across a couple of sites that reported the mature snails break the tip off their shell purposefully.

I'd noted their shells were nearly always minus the end and attributed it to wear and tear.  Nope.  The snail did that and nobody seems to know how, much less why.

Score another mystery for the snails.