Backyard Zoology · 1 August 2025
2025-08-01T17:38:16+10:00
https://www.facebook.com/backyardzoology/posts/pfbid035UUVoZbZ6SVz51owNazwkKdSJTeeu9dvtKoKXTcSJB8ZyAgGJrKHSzyvGNrsH9Ful

I'm a very hands on Backyard Zoologist. I pick up, turn over and inspect all the things. Which is great until you're in the local park, mid-way through teasing apart what you think is an owl pellet, looking for remnants of bone and fur so you can reverse engineer what the owl had for dinner, only to discover that you're actually dismantling a dog turd 🤣

But for better or worse I've been home a lot lately and so my ability to get myself into trouble has been greatly reduced.

Instead, trouble comes to me, often in the form of Matt bringing me offerings from out the back. Recently he walked inside, thick canvas gardening gloves on, tightly grasping several small sticks. He's NOT into touching the critters. He held the sticks out, as far away from himself as possible and perched on top was a precariously balanced…something. “I don’t know what this is,” he said, keeping the whatever it was, at arms length, “But it looks like something you might like.”

And he was right. It was exactly something I’d like: a fat, squidgy looking mystery and a mystery that needed to be solved straight away and that clearly wasn't a dog poo. Phew. 

I squeezed it ever so slightly. It was firm to the touch and incredibly sticky (so much so, it ended up taking a very determined amount of scrubbing with a nail brush to remove the slime off my hands). At that point looked and felt like nothing more than a leathery lump. 

I turned it over revealing a creamy underside and waited for what I expected would happen next. No more than a minute later, two tentacles popped up and the slug started to stretch itself out. 

The gift that my husband had quite literally dug up, was an Earshell Slug (Testacella haliotidea) an introduced species, with a small, rudimentary shell at the rear and a first for me. It's a carnivore as well, particularly loving worms which means finally there's something living in our yard that isn't determined to eat all my herbs!

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Earshell Slug
Northern Illawarra