Slug trails

This piece was published in Issue One (Spring 2022) of Love Wild Gardens, a gardening for nature magazine - read more about Love Wild Gardens here .

---

As dusk falls on a warm evening and birdsong subsides to the dusty flutter of moths, the shrill clicking of bats, I embark on a solitary search for slugs.

Emerging from cracks and crevices into the dew-sequinned grass, it's not only lettuce and cabbages they seek, but moonlit matings. Pasted trails, vital for movement but also thick with pheromones, lattice my path. A gluey history of those who've passed this way.

Some lead to shiny pools which glisten silver in my torch beam. Their creators immersed in a courtship routine - sliding in circles, orbiting each other, gliding on a rink of slime. Serenely engrossed, oblivious to my presence, they slowly entwine. Although hermaphroditic, this mutual sharing of genetic material is always beneficial.

But the mucous highway is fraught with danger. Cannibalistic individuals pursue potential prey, selecting their meal from the molluscan menu; tracking it down, leaving only gorged-out, crumpled remains.

It is one of these hunters I crave - the leopard slug. I scan my surroundings for tawny mottled mantles, the orbed outline of a mating couple, coiled and spiralling, suspended on an iridescent string - the acrobats of the undergrowth. But for now they evade me, elusive in the honeysuckled night.

**Since writing this, I have been fortunate enough to find a leopard slug - but I haven't seen them mating yet!