[rachelsco]

personally i dont use them, just netting against pigeons.
yesterday i found a recently deceased unmolested young blackbird, a few inches away was a snail shell covered in blue pellets round the rim; could the bird have eaten them and died - i dont know.   if it had eaten the snail when it had just eaten the pellets would it have died?   . of course it could have just died from other causes.
this has been puzzling me all morning, does anybody have any ideas.

[mumofstig]

The thread will probably be along these lines....................

The people who are against using slug pellets will, of course, blame them.
The people who use them will, of course, blame something else.

There is no answer to your puzzle without an autopsy 

please keep the debate  friendly

[TPKIRK]

You would need a toxicology report to determine if it was the pellets or not.
I'm afraid it could have been literally thousands of things, or a mixture of a few of them.

[rachelsco]

believe me i dont want to get into an unfriendly debate.
i dont want folk to think im having a go at anybody who uses slug pellets.  i would never comment on anyones use of anything that helps them achieve a harvest, and having had the contents of my greenhouse eaten last year i can certainly see why one would use them. 

[pdblake]

I do use them and don't really buy into the birds eating dead slugs thing. Most birds turn their noses up at carrion, save for carrion birds obviously, they have more sense. I've seen blackbirds turn down dead worms and only go for the ones that are still wriggling. I would think the same goes for hedgehogs and amphbians too. Animals aren't as stupid as we give them credit for. I'm also not sure just how many dead and poisoned slugs a bird would need to eat for it to be fatal.

Still best to use them sparingly though.

That said, this particular bird could have eaten the snail just as the snail was eating a pellet, there are exceptions to every rule after all.

Or it could have just dropped dead


ETA: I do of course realise that the slugs could be eaten whilst still in their death throes. Just how fast acting are slug pellets? Anyone know?

[Beetroot queen]

We find a lot of very small dead birds and mice on our site, not sure what its down too but if we didnt use pellets on our crops we might as well book a cab to tesco because we'd never get a single crop.  :blink:

It doesnt worry me who does and doesnt use pellets but i have to look at the whole picture animals could die from anything, just like us i suppose. 

[Sue33]

we had a dead bird caught up in our netting recently, I felt terrible but these things happen