Slugs have always copped a bad reputation in the eyes of gardeners. A new campaign titled Making Friends with Molluscs hopes to change this. The initiative, kickstarted by the Royal Horticultural Society and The Wildlife Trusts, encourages homeowners to consider the positive role of slugs and other molluscs in their garden’s ecosystem.
Slugs are often misunderstood and unfairly labelled as garden pests. While they can be known to treat your garden plants as a tasty snack, did you know slugs actually play an important part in our complex ecological community? In an interview with Gardens Illustrated, Jon Ablett, Senior Curator of Molluscs at the Natural History Museum explains that slugs are important in providing food for several species including birds, plus they help to “process the soil and increase the cycling of nutrients.”
Here at Really Wild Bird Food, keeping birds happy and fed is very important to us, so we did some research on the potential impact killing slugs can have on wild birds. This is what we found out…
Choosing to remove slugs from your garden can impact local birds in a few ways:
1. Reduced food source
Slugs can be a very handy extra source of food for birds like thrushes, blackbirds and starlings, so killing slugs would take away their easy access to a yummy protein-rich snack.
2. Disrupted ecosystem
Some slugs like to eat decomposing plant matter, which plays an important role in returning nutrients to soil. Removing them from the equation could have a negative impact on the entire ecosystem, impacting the plants and other insects that birds rely on.
3. Risk of poisoning
Killing slugs in your garden often requires using a chemical repellent. While this can be effective in getting rid of slugs, it also puts other living things at risk. Birds, for example, can be tempted by slug repellent pellets as they can look similar to food. Even the tiniest exposure to this kind of chemical can be fatal for small birds.
Additionally, birds are at risk of secondary poisoning if they eat slugs that have already been poisoned by repellents.
How can you help?
If you do choose to remove slugs from your garden, you can help birds by leaving out food to replace the protein they won’t get from slugs.
A delicious high-protein snack for birds is suet. We stock a brilliant range of suet and fatballs for birds that can easily be hung in your garden.
There are plenty of much safer slug repellents/deterrents available, too. These include:
- Wildlife friendly slug pellets
- Copper tape
- Beer traps (that’s right – slugs love beer! Place a shallow dish of beer on the soil and slugs will crawl in and drown)
- Slug-resistant plants
Countryside Stewardship 
