"Anne Jackson" wrote in message
...
The message from "Dick Chambers"
contains these words:

I have lived in the same house in Leeds for the last 33 years. During
the
first 27 (approximately) of these years, I hardly ever saw a snail,
although
I did have a large number of slugs. During the last 6 (approx) years,
there
has been a dramatic increase in the number of snails. On a wet evening
after
dark, if I go to post a letter in the local mail box, my feet
inadvertently
crunch a snail every tenth step, on average. I have just removed and
killed
about 50 of them from my bed of petunias, the bed being a mere 5 square
metres in area. The snails are thick on the ground. It ihas reached the
point where I would describe it as a plague.

Is this problem local to Leeds, or has there been the same problem
throughout the UK? What has caused the sudden increase in their
population?

I do not accept "global warming" as an answer -- far too easy, facile,
and
probably wrong. With global warming, Leeds nowadays has the same climate
as
Berkshire did 35 years ago when I lived there. Berkshire in 1972 did not
have the plague of snails I am experiencing here in Leeds in 2007.

I have the same problem here, in Perth. I put it down to the much milder
winters and the lack of thrushes in my garden. We used to have lots of
thrushes, now we have none.

--
AnneJ

It can be something as simple as your local authority being better at rat
control, rats in country/garden situations spend the winter hunting down
hibernating snails and eating them, they consume very large numbers and so
in spring you start from a low level, these days song thrushes appear much
in decline a local vet pathologist tells me a combination of slug pellets
and cats are responsible, we have both occasional slug pellets and cats but
still have thrushes so I don't know!

--
Charlie, gardening in Cornwall.
http://www.roselandhouse.co.uk
Holders of National Plant Collections of Clematis viticella (cvs) and
Lapageria rosea