humming birds wasps and snails

Recently, as in sometime during the early covid days whenever that happened, I told someone that I felt ambivalent about culling the plague of snails that live in my red hot poker patch. If it were her yard, she said, the snails would be scooped up and driven to the edge of town, released into the wild where they can live out their lives happy and free. 

My yard is past the edge of town, her snails probably found my poker patch. Lots of happy and free going on there.

I hadn't thought about garden snails since Donnivon dropped acid and grooved on the snail on his garden gate. Or maybe I dropped the acid and grooved on his record forty times in a row, can't remember. Thought snails were indigenous to warmer climes. We live in a microenvironment, just behind a log berm from shallow salt chuck, that doesn't even support slugs.   

Then a few years ago, whenever it happened, I started seeing an occasional snail around the yard. Mostly in the poker patch. Pokers grow with thick ground cover in which the snails thrive.  Started with one species, dull brown, then another showed up that is striped.  We don't spread poison around the yeard, but I felt a call of duty to cull the herd, after all, they are eating my precious poker plants, aren't they?

I did not take them to the edge of town.

Partly influenced by my friend and partly because the days tumbled into months and poker time came and went and a winter got squeezed in there somewhere and it's poker time again and I never got around to fishing for snails in the pokers.  

During the poker bloom, I like to sit watching everyone getting their fill. Stay still long enough and a few house finches visit for a snack, hummingbirds come close and a variety of bees are working the blossoms.  

Finches flutter around the far side of the house when I move to take a draft of strong beer, and a zen moment. Here I'm pretending to be Mr Mellow, live and let live even wasps, why the war on snails?  Two seasons now and I hadn't removed a single snail from the poker patch yet the bloom came on as good as ever and the plants seem to be surviving just fine. Should I be celebrating /tolerating/ the snail population the same as I do pretty much everyone else we share the environment with around here?

They are cool little critters, and after the bloom they went to work on the stalks, making it easier for me to clear later in the summer.  Winds have returned and everything not hunkered down blows away, but there is a lot more happy and free-living going with the snails wintering over under the thatch at the base of the poker patch than here in the warm and dry house, but that probably belongs in a different story.