This  pretty little shell is rather uncommon in the NE USA, but is fairly
easy to find at some beaches in the spring months April-June; this is
particularly true along the shores of Great South Bay in Suffolk  County,
Long Island, NY.  One small nondescript  bay beach (no more than 0.1-0.2
miles long) in East Patchogue that I have visited over a number of years
has been especially productive this year- on the 18th of May three of us
(Carl Slotnick, Ed Tory, and I)  found over 80 good specimens in the
drift.  I returned  two days later and found over 95 specimens. They
haven’t been particularly big this year, but  a good number are in the 14-
15mm size range, and quite a few  are very thick, and dark, so dark that
when I included several in an unsorted mix of shells from this beach that I
gave to a fellow collector, he was surprised when I asked a few days later
if he liked the wentletraps. He was stunned, “what wentletraps” he said,
because there were no white or light colored shells in there. These bay
beaches  have a low species diversity, but the species can be interesting-
good quantities of Nassarius vibex,  also uncommon in the NE USA, and
generally bigger and darker and different looking than the ones in Florida.
Also,  out of the many, many thousands of Crepidula convexa that make up
the majority of the beachdrift here its often possible to find a few that
are uniformly orange or peach colored.  Generally the number of these
Crepidula in the drift and on the beach correlates well with how many
rupicolas you can expect to find during that time.

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