It was almost the thickness of my pinky finger!

Maybe he's a nightcrawler.

DaisyI said:Maybe he's a nightcrawler.

I think those are from Canada, so this is probably an unusually large garden earthworm.

Lumbricus terrestrial.

From Wikipedia:
In North America, the term nightcrawler (or vitalis) is also used. In Canada, it is also called the dew worm, or "Grandaddy Earthworm”.

interesting... Mac!

One that size was always referred to as a nightcrawler, and we always found them, at night, on the ground or partially in their wormholes. Smaller ones, dug up in the garden or fields, we referred to as earthworms. It seems like they are one and the same, just at a different stage of growth.

Yep, when I lived in Connecticut we would hunt nightcrawlers...at night. Some people used a flashlight but one guy used a saw. Like a regular hand saw for wood. The vibration of the saw made the nightcrawlers come to the surface and he just gathered them up. Some people call this method 'fiddling for worms'. Here is a link to show the method:
http://www.arkansasonline.com/...

Some people use electric shock from an old crank telephone magneto. Only us old-timers would know about those .
http://www.yesterdaystractors....

When you posted about the huge worm it reminded me of something.
When my children were in grade school there was a very popular book called "How to Eat Fried Worms". http://www.barnesandnoble.com/...

I'm glad mine never saw that book when they were young. Green eggs and ham was bad enough. I had to dye the eggs green everyday for a year.

Fishermen set large metal stakes in moist soil and pound them to get earthworms to the surface. My dad had a spot where he kept canvas on the ground with some wilted spinach underneath. When we went fishing, there were always worms under the canvas.

I saw one so fat and long the other day, I jumped thinking it was a snake!

Some people get angry when I tell them I hate Robins. "They are so beautiful and represent Spring" they say.

I say they just eat my worms and I hate them!

Robins gotta eat too. They don't eat enough of my worms for me to be concerned .

I don't know how well the worms fared against the robins last year at my house but they did eat my green beans (vegetarian robins?)

Night Crawlers are too large for a Robin to swallow, now Grackles are good at chowing down on them.

For what ever reason, I no longer have many Grackles down at the old home. There used to be so many I would eliminate a few with a BB gun in the seventies and eighties as they pooped all over every thing but I never seemed to make a dent.
When the last of the big old trees finally went down, even though they nested in the surviving very large Norwegian Spruce across the street, within ten years they are few and far between.
There songs are not particularly melodious but I miss it.
Night Crawlers leave mounds in the lawn and make it bumpy after a few years; the lack of Grackles has made the lawn down there a bumpy sucker.

Our earthworms seldom reach "Night Crawler" size, though we do find them occasionally, usually dug out of the ground. We get lots of transient Grackles, sometimes in 1/4 mile long flights. They don't overnight, just drop in for a while, clear the land of whatever it is they eat, them move on. They're pretty noisy. Lately we've been getting a lot of red-wing blackbirds.