Lately I’ve been noticing lots of moon snail shells on the beach. Most of these seem to have been poached and eaten by sea gulls, their glistening shells left behind. These snails are found on almost all Cape Cod beaches and come in two types, the northern moon snail and the shark’s eye moon snail.

The ones I find most often seem to be the northern variety. When you find a shark’s eye moon snail, you know it because it has a very distinctive “eye” marking. Anyway, many mollusks such as snails and clams are around all winter but buried pretty deeply or are farther out to sea to avoid all the pounding of winter waves and to avoid being exposed to winter cold. Finding their fresh shells on the beach means they are back for the season. It also means the gulls are pretty happy to have some fresh meat, if the numbers of shells on the jetties and in the parking lot are any indication….

It’s still a bit cold to draw outdoors but shells are easy to bring indoors and drawing shells is great practice, both for the eye and the hand. I have been keeping nature journals for many years and all of them are full of shell drawings.

One of the things that makes drawing shells such good practice is that if you get their shape wrong, it is really easy to tell. And getting their shapes right is much harder than you might think…

While poking around looking at moon snail information on the internet this afternoon I came across this information about moon snails of the world. Seriously, take a look. I think you’ll be amazed by how many there are….