Snail Update

 I hate meeting with the controllers who oversee this blog.  Who would have thought that selling my soul would result in a group of eldritch and frankly somewhat bizarre powers from what I suspect is a definitely second rate plane of existence dictating what I write.  Still you make the deal and you take the consequences I guess.  It was a little late to point out I hadn't intended to sell my soul but simply got a wrong number while trying to order pizza.

"We are disappointed in you," boomed a voice that seemed to come from everywhere.  Not for the first time I regretted introducing them to public address systems.

"Disappointed?" I asked, I wasn't surprised.  They rarely summoned me to pat me on the back for a job well done.  And since I don't particularly like being patted on the back by a tentacle that was just fine with me.

"Your blog is a tedious repetition of after action reports and travel stories.  There is no excitement, no controversy.  Nothing changes."

"Another way of saying that is I'm consistent."  I needn't have bothered.  I won't say they don't have a sense of humour I just don't think I want to witness the sort of things that make them laugh.  "I just posted another after action report," I offered.  A second voice interrupted the first.  If pleurisy could speak its voice would sound like this.

"We have had enough of these things.  We desire entertainment and information."

"Have you tried Fox News?"

"We have some standards."

"Fair enough, fortunately I have good news for you.  A whole new line of blog entries starting today.  They will be informative, exciting and designed to appeal to a mass audience."

"This pleases us," said the first voice.  "On what topic will you discourse?"

"Snails!"

"What the fuck?"

OK, I have to admit that snails was simply the first word to come into my head.  Still it got me out of there with what was left of my sanity intact.  Let's see if I can inject a little undeserved enthusiasm into the below.

Travel out of Brisbane (always a good thing to do should you find yourself there) and head west through Toowoomba and keep on going (always a good thing to do if you find yourself going through Toowoomba) until finally all shreds of civilisation fall away.  Human settlement is limited to wretched little villages clinging to the earth surrounded by vast farmlands.  Here life is, well not cheap given the cost of bringing essentials to the shops but it gives the impression that it should be cheap.  On and on you go until the horizon blurs in front of your eyes and the occasion patch of unchopped trees leaps out at you with a suddenness you find shocking, particularly if you were meant to be driving down a road.  Slam on the brakes and stagger out to get your bearings.  There you will find that your bearings are fine and the countryside does actually look like that.  Take a closer look at the trees.  Step forward, do you hear that crunch?  It was probably an endangered snail that you just ground into the dirt.

Out here clinging to a tenuous existence is the Dulacca Woodland Snail.  I found out about this marvelous beast while gazing over details of an eponymous windfarm to be located in the area.  The wind farm's soothe the peasants brochure made quite a thing of the Dulacca Woodland Snail and noted that the wind farm was to be built within what was called the creatures "range".  Range?  It's a damned snail, its range is approximately fifteen centimetres on a good day with the wind behind it.

The wind farm's proponents concede that despite the heroic efforts undertaken by the planners an area of over a hectare of snail habitat will be "adversely affected" (translation; built on).  However because the proponents are proud snail fetishists (I'll bet there's a website) they have identified not one but three hectares of nearby degraded bushland that they will progressively remediate over the next thirty years to provide triple the habitation for our endangered friends.  Thirty years incidentally also being the length of time it will take the snails to travel from their current location to this new wonderland always assuming someone tells them where it is.

By the way "degraded bushland" is a pretty broad term.  Pretty much the entire CBD of Sydney could be described as "degraded bushland" depending on how degraded you like your bushland.  But back to the Dulacca Woodland Snail.  Don't worry it hasn't gone very far.  

Despite its small size the Dulacca Woodland Snail is vital to the environmental health of the native bush.  Fortunately there isn't much of that left either so its inevitable extinction won't create too much of a gap.  Incidentally I don't actually know that the snail is vital to the environmental health of the native bush or anything else for that matter (except the snails themselves obviously).  It's just that whenever anything small and not particularly appealing gets threatened and the general consensus is that this is perhaps a species that we can bid goodbye to without too much in the way tears some environmentalist jumps up to point out that all life on earth will perish if the damn thing so much as catches a cold.

Let us therefore bid the Dulacca Woodland Snail bon chance as it sets out on its thirty year journey just down the road to a new and brilliant future.  I predict in a few generations time the Dulacca Woodland Snail will be so prolific that we will need to organise culls to stop them feasting on small children and rampaging (very slowly) through local towns.