"Malcolm" wrote in message
...

In article , Jane Ransom
writes
In article , Malcolm
writes

In article , Jane Ransom
writes
In article ,
Paul
D.Smith writes
Sounds like your blackbirds are searching for slugs

No, no, no - blackbirds do not eat slugs!!
They are just searching for worms and insects.

Hey, why not give blackbirds the credit that is their due?!

They certainly do eat slugs

Perhaps you could let the people who compiled the 'cd rom guide to
British birds' and the Readers Digest who compiled the 'book of
British
birds' then!!!!!!

I once went through them to see what birds ate slugs.
There were only 7 -

Starling, partridge, corncrake, stone curlew, spotted crake, black
tailed godwit and moorhen.

Well, I'm astonished that no member of the thrush family is
mentioned.
But of course that just goes to show you can't trust what you read
in
bird books :-))

But if you do (!), then as well as the book on thrushes that I
quoted,
slugs are mentioned as blackbird food in the 7-volume (and *very*
authoritative) 'Birds of the Western Palearctic'. They are also
mentioned as being eaten "in abundance" in 'The Blackbird'
(Hillstead
1945).

I have watched both male and female blackbirds catching and eating
slugs in the garden. I have also on various occasions watched a
thrush beating a snail on a stone to crack the shell before extracting
the snail for eating.

Franz