How to watch a snail

Go out when the ground is wet and the light is failing. Take a torch with a warm beam and hold it low, nearly level with the soil, so bodies and trails catch the light. Walk slowly enough to see the path before your boot does. The first snails will be at the edges: the base of a wall, the rim of a pot, the stem of a plant that was entire at noon.

When you find one that is moving, stop. A minute of stillness shows more than ten minutes of handling. Watch the foot. On the side of a clay pot, or through a pane of glass, the muscular waves are visible as a dark ripple along the sole. Watch the tentacles work one at a time. Watch the pneumostome open on the right side of the body and then close. If the animal is feeding, the head makes a slow scrape. You will not see the teeth. You do not need to. The missing bloom on the leaf is the evidence that the radula was there.

Picking the animal up is usually unnecessary. If you need to move it off a path, wet a hand first, slide a finger under the front of the foot instead of pulling the shell upward, and hold it over something soft. A drop of half a metre can crack the shell. Do not poke the eyes. Do not sprinkle salt, vinegar, or beer to see what happens. Those are injuries with an audience, and they have been described too many times already.

Put the snail back on the damp surface it was using, in the same direction if you noticed. An animal placed in the middle of a dry slab has been handed a problem it had already solved. The notes worth keeping are plain: the place, the weather, what it was doing, whether it was sealed or out, and the species if you know it. Twenty nights of such notes will teach you one garden. A single dramatic photograph will not.

Then go inside. The rest of the night belongs to the animals that come out only when the path is empty.