Sticky business for the Song Thrush

At last! I’ve had some rain in my Sussex garden. It’s nowhere near enough to fill up the wetlands or stave off the hosepipe bans, but it is dearly welcome.

But it does come with a downside – the synchronised emergence of a marauding army of snails and slugs in my garden each night. It's raining now as I write, and I can almost hear the sound of chomping!

Now all the gardening for wildlife books (including my own) will tell you of all the things that will eat them – frogs, toads, slow-worms, badgers, foxes, thrushes. So, given the several hundredweight of slugs and snails on offer, why is my garden not full of a welcome band of mollusc munchers when I go out there with a torch?

The truth of the matter seems to be that, while some creatures will take slugs and snails at times, they just aren’t top of the menu.

Watch a creature trying to eat one of them that you realise how well adapted slugs and snails are at avoiding becoming lunch. When tackled, they exude a vile, slimy mucus that must be a devil to swallow.

So I was pleased to grab some photographs of a Song Thrush tackling a slug.

It involved a lot of smearing of the prey in the dirt of a path, wiping it one way and then the next, to make it swallowable. [Quick disclaimer: They're action shots, taken in the shade, so please excuse the photo quality!].

What Song Thrushes really prefer is a nice earthworm, and the wet weather should at least have brought some of them to the surface too. Dry summer weather limiting the availability of earthworms has been one of the factors behind the dramatic decline in the number of Song Thrushes in recent years, as reported in the Biodiversity Action Plan report here.

Great too to see the excitement on the RSPB Community where various readers have Song Thrushes nesting or visiting gardens. Let's hope this signals the start of a good breeding season for them.