It was at this time of the year that the soil came alive. It would crawl and slither and run and skitter. Little crevasses became streams in woodlands and gardens, earthworms were flooded out of their holes and made into refugees, and slugs crawled mournfully to drier ground. Frogs croaked, loving the wetness of the soil, watching from below leaves, and we felt rather than saw their eyes on us.
Scientists are now listening to the soil, in what they call ‘ecoacoustics’. Life inside soil—including the scraping sound made by busy earthworms—is what they hope to pick up on. The hypothesis is that the noisier the soil, the richer with life it is.
As a child, our first encounters with slugs were odd, and often, nocturnal. Rather than looking like things that lived below our feet, slugs looked alien. They had antennae that would shoot out in a startling (though harmless) motion, and fluid bodies which seemed amorphous. They would leave long silvery trails on the ground and leaves, an atlas of wandering. They came in different colours, often a leathery black, and sometimes a chocolate brown. On a wet post-monsoon evening, under the verandah light, I peered at a slug. “Don’t touch that!” my neighbour screamed at me. He was looking over the boundary wall, and had all the seriousness of a young child trying to impress a slightly older one. Why not, I asked, with a swift, chastising look. “It’s a leech. It will suck your blood. It will get fat on you.” A pause, for a smirk: “But you know, you can kill it with salt. I can get you some.”
This formed the beginning of my lifelong interest in nature—surely, this little thing I had handled so often wasn’t going to suck my blood? It would die with a sprinkle of salt though. We have often dismissed the things we tread on, but today, life (and the soil) is quieter, quite literally. I barely see slugs and earthworms, and overall there is a general global loss of invertebrates and insects.
On September 15, trailblazing writer Annie Dillard passed away. The winner of the Pulitzer prize, Annie reflected often on how easy it is to miss something in nature.
This is a question well worth asking again and again. What is around us, how often do we miss it, is it of value only when almost gone? This post-monsoon season, lack of ecoacoustic equipment notwithstanding, I will be looking for the slug-that-is-not-a-leech, little globes of mud left over by earthworms, and as I write in my book, Wild Capital, fireflies that were once in every lawn.
I hope you will join me.
Views expressed are personal
Posts on X: @nehaa_sinha
