Sluggish

It was another dreary, wet morning, though warmer than yesterday and without the biting wind. R and I were both grumpy about this interruption to the onset of spring, when it had only just about got started, so we did the thing that usually works for us when we're out of sorts, and went out for lunch. The bird hide at Hillers had lots of people but just a few dishevelled birds, but the café served us an excellent lunch, and the farm shop sent us on our way with a delicious treat to have with mid-afternoon coffee, so on balance the trip was a success.

Checking the pulmonaria in the front garden as we arrived home, I was unsurprised, given the temperature, to find several damp plumpies out and about foraging. So I changed lenses from long to macro, and went back out to see if I could catch any of them on camera. In the event they were quite easy, because although mild it wasn't warm enough to maintain their body temperature at zooming around level. They all had to stop quite frequently to rest, and even when flying they were a little sluggish, which is how I was able to take this shot at just 1/400 second.

After visiting the plumpies I pruned a couple of shrubs, though more so I could say I'd done something useful than from any actual desire to be gardening. Duty done, I was rummaging around the wild garden in search of beetles, asyoudo, when I tripped over something even more sluggish than the plumpies, on a pile of rotting elder logs. I'd never seen one before, but I announced to it, "You are a leopard slug, and I claim my £5." If you check out tonight's second image (which would probably have made top spot, if the creature hadn't had its head buried in a crevice), you'll see that this wasn't a major feat of intuitive identification: what I could see of the slug was several inches long, and heavily spotted. Nonetheless, I used the Obsidentify app on my phone to check that it was indeed a leopard slug, and then did a quick internet search to see if it was the kind of pestifarious nuisance one might want to be picking up and hurling into a neighbour's garden.

(An aside here: if you're as old as me, you'll probably remember, as I do, when finding out these facts would have required getting a bus into the middle of town and visiting the reference library - where in all likelihood none of the several promising volumes they offered you would actually have contained the information you needed, but you'd have wasted half the afternoon finding out even that much. But if you told kids today all this.... they'd look at you as though you were making up a not very convincing story. When people say things aren't like they used to be, my usual answer is "No, thank goodness.")

Anyhoo, it transpires that leopard slugs are The Gardener's Friend, because they eat not only rotting plant matter, but also other slugs. They are native to Europe, and have been recorded in the UK since the C17th, but in some other parts of the world such as the USA, where they're an introduced species, they're listed as an agricultural pest. There's lots more information about them on Wikipedia, including the fact that they have pretty wild sex lives. Slugs are hermaphrodite and can impregnate themselves, but leopard slugs prefer to mate with a friend, which they do by hanging upside down from a mucous thread, coiling around each other, and entwining their penises. Can't imagine this? Here's a film of it happening (don't say I never give you nice things). After copulation each slug will lay a batch of eggs, which will hatch after about four weeks.