Over the winter, I wrap a few of my more sensitive potted plants in several layers of recycled brown paper bags. In the spring yard cleanup, the bags get their second (or third) recycling, this time shredded into the compost. After I remove the critters that have used it for their winter quarters, of course.
In the bags around my sausage vine, besides a humongous slug, I found a nice assortment of tiny creepy-crawlies.
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| A striped springtail, Orchesella cincta. Most of these were impossible to catch, and went into the compost with the bag. This guy was lucky. |
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| A quick red mite. |
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| There were quite a few of these long snails, about the size of a short grain of rice. (Update: Columella edentula) |
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| Spiderling with a yellow belly. |
As I demolished the bags, I brushed off all the little ones I could into a pill bottle. Before I took them outside and set them free, on a whim, I pointed the camera straight down into the bottle. I liked the result:
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| 8 or 9 snails, several different springtails, a couple of spiders, and a handful of sowbugs. The mite is in there somewhere, too. |
And then they all went out into the warm spring night to find a new home.
