Alex,

My lepidopteran interests suggest a clue. Of the several wooded parks in New
York City, Central Park is not the best for observing butterflies despite
its large area. Unlike the other parks, whose soil and vegetation have some
continuity with those existing beforehand, Central Park was largely stripped
and thoroughly relandscaped in an effort to achieve a naturalistic effect.
The landscape was originally too rocky and swampy to support attractive
trees, so half a million cubic feet of topsoil was carted in from New
Jersey. A large part of the park was covered by a reservoir that has become
the Great Lawn.

As butterflies can fly and landsnails can't, I would expect the molluscan
fauna to be even more severely reduced than the lepidopteran fauna was. It's
interesting to note that even animals that can fly apparently have had a
hard time recolonizing the park from smaller parks on the same island.

See http://www.naba.org/pubs/ab97c/p4.html for a park-by-park guide to the
butterflies of New York City, which could provide clues to which parks are
likely to have landsnails. And see
 http://www.centralparknyc.org/centralparkhistory/cp-history-150yrs for a
brief history of Central Park. If these URLs don't work, they may be doubled
by the software, so try cutting and pasting half. Or search for "Central
Park" and "New York City Butterflies" on Google.

Cheers,
Andy

Andrew K. Rindsberg



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