Friday Pic #2: Cracked
This week’s Pic was taken back in November when I spent a couple of weeks at a marine laboratory on the west coast of Sweden. On a walk along the beach I spotted this:
A seashell from a gastropod, lodged into a crack in the bark of a pine and cracked open. The shell was situated about a meter above ground, if I recall correctly, and there were more cracked shells and shell fragments on the ground beneath it.
I know woodpeckers and other birds lodge nuts and other food into the bark of trees to crack them open, and some shore-living birds bring shelled molluscs to certain rocks away from the shoreline where they crack and eat them. But I have never heard of a woodpecker gathering molluscs, taking them into the trees away from the shore, and lodging them into the bark just above ground! Of course, a human may have done this - possibly with the intent to confuse biologists - but that seems a bit unlikely.
Does anyone have an idea who might have done this?
“at a marine laboratory on the west coast of Sweden”: tmbl or kmf? (or should I say “the labs formerly known as…”)
The shell looks to me kind of sea-worn. I am not 100% sure from the pic, but since shells that look like that have usually been dead and empty for a while, I’d guess H sapiens did it.
Comment by windy — January 28, 2008 @ 18:04
Windy, Thanks for the comment. I was at tmbl, there’s some more pics from that trip here. All of the shells looked old, but to me that simply suggested that it might’ve been stuck in that tree for quite a while, not that it was already old when it was put there. While I can imagine a kid picking up a shell and lodging it into a pine, I can’t quite see him/her then scattering shell fragments along the base… But, you’re probably right.
Comment by Felicia Gilljam — January 28, 2008 @ 20:19
Sorry, I did it.
Comment by Martin R — January 31, 2008 @ 10:11