drought!

[Frederick W. Schueler]

Everyone,

Here we are with the unprecedented expression "as limp as a Jerusalem
Artichoke leaf" (as per the attached photo), and my main outdoors
activity is carrying buckets of water around to the Squash plants.

On our shallow soil in Bishops Mills, we're seeing unexpected species of
plants wilt and collapse: some Carex that we brought back from Lake Erie
in 2003 has been growing in a bathtub in the garden since then, but now
all its stems & foliage are dead; Comfrey is flat on the ground;
Cathartic Buckthorn is shedding a lot of yellowed leaves, we have a big
Manitoba Maple where most of the foliage is yellowed, some deep-rooted
Horseradish clumps are going limp, and some stands of the pestilential
Goutweed are flat on the ground.

In the "snail saplings" across the street the Cepaea snails that climbed
up to 2.5 m height at the last rain haven't had enough dew to motivate
them to come down, and at a vegetable slops pile which attracts 30-50
snails when it's wet even pouring a bucket of water onto the pile didn't
elicit any activity.

The creek in the village here, with its vast wetland headwaters, hasn't
gone down as much as I'd expected it would, and a survey of the transect
above the bridge didn't turn up any freshly dead or predated mussel
shells. Below the dam in Oxford Mills flow hasn't reached our informal
drought criterion of being entirely leakage through the logs of the
spillways, but the deep moss that grew up in 2024's rainy summer is
largely exposed as a lumpy dead brown carpet.

Now it's time to get out and move stuff around before it's 30°C - Aleta
just came in with a photo of a little Cepaea active on a Hosta leaf -
what are others seeing of the drought?

fred.
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---------Frederick W. Schueler & Aleta Karstad ------------
Fragile Inheritance Natural History - https://fragileinheritance.ca/
6 St-Lawrence Street Bishops Mills, RR#2 Oxford Station, Ontario K0G 1T0
on the Smiths Falls Limestone Plain 44.87156° N 75.70095° W
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[Frederick W. Schueler]

On 8/11/2025 6:57 AM, Frederick W. Schueler wrote:

> In the "snail saplings" across the street the Cepaea snails that climbed
> up to 2.5 m height at the last rain haven't had enough dew to motivate
> them to come down, and at a vegetable slops pile which attracts 30-50
> snails when it's wet even pouring a bucket of water onto the pile didn't
> elicit any activity.

* after an "overly generous" 4 mm of rain this morning, the snails are
moving around on the saplings, and the slops pile, which had no snails
on it at 08h19, when the rain had just started, was swarmed by 55 of all
sizes at 11h25, after the rain had ended.

We have a pile of dead Buckthorn branches, which has had only none or a
few snails on it through the drought, and at 11h32 there were only ten
visible in the pile, but 58 counted on a square metre of the the
adjacent path, as if they were crawling out from the shelter of the
Cedar thicket there to return to feed on the leaves of the pile (I'd
previously wondered why a few times I'd seen large numbers of snails on
the path, and this pretty well confirms that when they're done feeding
they go across the path to the Cedar, rather than hunkering down under
the pile).

No more rain is forecast, so it's going to be interesting to see how
this minimal interruption of the dryness is going to influence plants
and frogs and snails.