In article , Jane Ransom
writes

Look . . . slugs and snails tend to come out at night and gobble up the
slug pellets.

This means they are dead by morning.

Birds that eat slugs and snails are not carrion eaters.

What about the carrion eaters that will eat the corpses? Is there a
possibility that they might be affected? OK, I know they aren't pretty
fluffy songbirds, but nasty creepy crawlies ;-)

They will not touch anything already dead and they don't come out at
night to eat something that may be dying.

But toads and hedgehogs do come out at night ...

We usually use a few slug pellets early in the year and we have song
thrushes, mistle thrushes and blackbirds in the same numbers (maybe even
more as we have slowly provided more habitat) as we had 11 years ago.

Whereas we have *more* mistle thrushes, song thrushes and blackbirds
than we had 11 years ago ;-)

--
Kay Easton

Edward's earthworm page:
http://www.scarboro.demon.co.uk/edward/index.htm