Snail Plague Update

Following on from my post the other day about our snail plague the 500+ snails have now been delivered to the wildlife carer who was astounded at the number we had collected.

She ended up paying us $50 for them which we were happy with considering she was taking them all off our hands.  We still have more snails but most of them are just fed to the chickens.

Hopefully we will have less destruction in the garden now that we have less but I suspect there are probably many more hiding in the garden.

Pestilence and Destruction

Sound the alarm we are under attack!

Attack from a plague of snails of biblical proportions.

I am not sure why but this year we have more snails that I have seen here in the last 5 years and I would have thought with all the dry weather over winter it would not have been great snail breeding weather, I guess I was wrong.

Check out the below, this is how many snails we collected from the garden on day 1.

Since these photos were taken we have collected another 200 - 400 snails from our garden over a couple of days.
So rather than just think about how we can get rid of them  (I have a plan for that) I first started thinking about what is this infestation telling me about our garden?

The ideas I came up with were that:
We need more lizards and frogs (our winter was quite cold and we have not seen as many frogs as normal)
We should be raising ducks, although I am not sure they could be controlled to just eat snails)
Our veggie garden is not the major food source (although they seem to be big fans of my seedlings) as we are seeing some damage but not complete devastation
We could be eating snails as a form of protein (I am not entirely joking about this )
We need to be more diligent and feed more of them to the chickens
We need to snail hunt on a regular basis to control the population
Our humid shade house is the perfect breeding ground for snails

So what am I going to do with over 500 snails?  Well I am taking then to a wildlife centre.

For the last few weeks Hubby's parents have had a carpet python in their garden.  Because it had not moved and we thought it was injured they called a wildlife carer.  The wildlife carer came and confirmed that it had a broken back o took it away to be euthanasied.  But at some stage during the conversation the wildlife carer told my in-laws how they were buying in snails to feed to all the lizards and that there was a snail shortage (yes because they are all at our place) and they were having to pay up to $1 per snail.
Ding ding ding!  Show me the money!

So the plan is to take the snails to Brisbane (Hubby has to go anyway) so that the wildlife people can make good use of our excess and hopefully we can bring the pestilence and destruction to an end, well we should slow it down at least.

We are pretty sure they will be shocked at the number of snails we are delivering so it will be interesting to find out their reaction.

Do you have excessive snail numbers, or anything else, at your place?