Stemke Douglas wrote:

>   Starting off as a kid
> who got almost all his seashells at Shelia's Rockshop in Edmonton,
> Alberta, Canada I can tell you that I have gone through multiple
> shades of green reading the replies.

* and, gosh, you all seem to have gone towards the Equator in pursuit of
shells. If you go north, ignorance is so pervasive all across Canada
that you don't have to go far from roads to scoop up amazing eddy-nests
of drifted land snail shells, or to find beds of Unionids in the outlets
of lakes well north of their known range limits.

But I'd say that for sheer shelly surprise value the marine shells at
the mouths of the rivers in James Bay have to take the cake. I'm not
very much into marine Molluscs, we weren't specifically looking for
marine species, and I haven't looked at the rivermouth samples since we
got back, but it seemed that at each of the rivers we visited in 2002
(see http://pinicola.ca/g2003b.htm ) there was a completely different
fauna, of which we were just seeing subsamples.

Our conclusion was that "Everything you've heard about James Bay" -- the
tides, the storms, the flatness, the mud, the dams, the lichens, the
Jack Pines, the herpetology, the Geese, etc., etc., "is true," and what
you hear in the south is only the beginning of what's to be seen when
you're there.

fred.
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           Bishops Mills Natural History Centre
Frederick W. Schueler, Aleta Karstad, Jennifer Helene Schueler
      RR#2 Bishops Mills, Ontario, Canada K0G 1T0
   on the Smiths Falls Limestone Plain 44* 52'N 75* 42'W
     (613)258-3107 <[log in to unmask]> http://pinicola.ca
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