Birds eating my slug pellets...

amandstu

It is the ferric phosphate kind

What to do?

I throw them down and the following morning they are all gone .-not to mention that the birds move on to the brassica leaves after their free meal is finished.

I have started netting the brassicas and this should sort it out but is there an easier way?

This is not what it said on the tin:(

looksee

Use some flat stones, tiles anything of that sort, raised up on a few small stones so there is about a couple of centimeters of clearance, and put the slug pellets under it in some strategic places. The birds won't be able to get at it and the snails will find it, they love to hide under that kind of shelter anyway.

amandstu

The instructions for these pellets is to scatter them evenly among the plants.(and you can't cover all those obviously)

I have previously tried what you said anyway. Maybe it worked since I may not have been doing it everywhere.

By the way ,when these pellets get "hairy" as they do under stones and pieces of wood , do they work still ? (do they attract?)

Also do you think they would work as a barrier ? (underneath an old piece of plank for example) -I think I may have seen the council doing this but I don't know if it was metaldehyde or ferric phosphate pellets.

looksee

Well the short answer is that I don't know. However I do know that people use way too many slug pellets - i have seen them in heaps as though for a physical barrier You really only need a very thin scatter. Maybe someone else will have suggestions, but the 'shelter' one is the only one I can think of.

amandstu

That is more or less how I saw them as spread by the Council around the town's flower beds - a thick barrier tantamount to a long heap.

I assumed they might have an idea of why they were doing that. In the centre of town though their risk of slug attack on flowers would be far less than mine -in an overgrown vegetable garden where the slugs are never that far distant from their "food" and it it is impossible to really beat them back any distance.

I know that metaldehyde should never be put down in a heap but I have never before come across the problem of birds eating slug pellets.

I imagined that metaldehyde pellets would be harmful to birds (and so they must not find them attractive or else we would notice dead or damaged birds) but I think ferric phosphate is harmless to them (but not to me if they eat them!)

When I bought the ferric phosphate pellets the instructions were to scatter them at approx 3 " distance not more than 3 or 4 times over the life cycle of the plant.

It said nothing about what to do if the birds ate them in revolving door fashion..... or if a spell of wet weather (which we get so infrequently of course) brings a new batch of slugs to the party.