Rainy Day Bonding: Hunting Forest Snails in January

The month of January is part of the rainy season, so forest snails start to come out and are easy to spot on trees, branches, and tree trunks.

The three of us—my father, my younger brother, and I—went to the forest to hunt snails for our lunch. At first, it was really difficult because it had been a long time since I last hunted takyong. I think it has been about two years already.

But since I was really craving it, I pushed myself to search harder—haha! I didn’t give up, and eventually, I found a takyong on a labnog tree branch. It wasn’t very big, but it was enough for the viands HAHAHA!

This is how we looked after hunting around ten takyong. Even though it wasn’t that many, we still worked hard just to have something to cook.

Once you spot one forest snail, you start feeling excited, thinking you might find more. And true enough, we didn’t stop searching even though we were already soaked by the rain. We were supposed to vlog at that time, but the rain became heavier. Hunting became more difficult because whenever we looked up at the branches, the rain would hit our eyes.

The takyong looked so cute crawling on the tree branches. While picking them up, I couldn’t help but imagine how we would cook them—HAHAHA!

My younger brother was very hardworking and kept climbing trees whenever we spotted a snail that was far away. Good thing he knows how to climb! If it were me, I wouldn’t even know how to get down—HAHAHA!

My father was happy because we had already found a good number of snails. Even though it was raining hard and we kept slipping, it felt like a bonding moment for us as a family while hunting takyong.

These are the snails we gathered, now ready to be cooked. On our way home, we stopped by to buy “puso” (hanging rice) so our viands would taste even better and be more filling.

Ahhh, it didn’t take long to cook—HAHAHA! I was already extremely hungry at that time because I was the one who cleaned and prepared the snails.