This is Rumble Strip. I'm Erica Heilman.

Most people are freaked out by these snails.

I have to say that I'm a little freaked out by these snails.

Do you judge me for that? Does that make you think less of me?

No. But maybe once we talk about them, they'll become endearing to you, as they are to me.

That's my friend Brian Pfeiffer.

He's a writer and a field naturalist here in Montpelier, Vermont.

And no, the snails did not become more endearing to me.

But I love talking with Brian about what he finds in the woods. It's exactly like being with a

seven-year-old who caught something and then put it in a glass jar with a bunch of leaves

if that seven-year-old was also an expert in birds and butterflies and dragonflies and plants and all kinds of other things.

Brian has retained his exuberance.

He's one of those rare grown-ups who can still sit at the kids' table.

I actually made a story with Brian a few years ago.

We went birding together and I can link to that story on the website.

Anyway, recently, this summer, Brian published an article about his discovery of these crazy zombie

snails whose eye stalks have been taken over by these long, wet, pulsing, technicolor appendages.

Yeah, anyway, here's Brian Pfeiffer.

I was out walking the dog, Odin, named for a Norse god.

And we're just walking on botanizing, and I look down and I see one of these amber

snails, these land snails, really common brown snails that are widely distributed around the world

actually. And the tentacles are flashing and pulsing with green and brown stripes and they're rhythmically moving in and out.

...