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.
Hi Stich
Ah, so that's where all my slugs come from, then - they're the ones you thrown out ;-)
Yes, the return of the thrushes would be great, wouldn't it? All that we can do as gardeners is do our very best, and encourage our neighbours to do the same, knowing that we can make a difference.
Yep, we have lot of HUGE green/brown slugs. Occasional visit by a hedgehog, who does his best, but never eradicates all of them. What to do, good question. I pack them off on holiday, away from here, never to return, I hope. But, still they appear. Oh for the days when Thrushes were plentiful, at least we could enjoy the entertainment you described. Alas, I fear, as is the way with most birds, the decline will never be reversed, only memories last forever. I would be only too pleased to see the return of the Thrushes in our garden, and watch them opening the snails on the anvil, happy days.