When a letter starts "I must strongly protest at an article written by Adam Pasco..." then I do wonder what I've done wrong.
When a letter starts "I must strongly protest at an article written by Adam Pasco…" then I do wonder what I've done wrong.
Let me set the scene. You can't find much more of a bird lover than me. Just take a look at my garden, and the way I garden, and you'll see what I mean. Feeders provide seed and peanuts for birds all-year-round. Plants with fruits and berries are grown to provide birds with fresh pickings - especially my cherries and soft fruits, where I'm sometime lucky to get a look in! Apple windfalls are left beneath trees for blackbirds to peck at.
Hedges and thick shrubs provide shelter and nesting sites - I could show you at least four sites around my garden where sparrows, blackbirds, robin and wren (I think) nested last year. Water is provided in a bird bath and large terracotta saucers on the patio, and I don't use any pesticides around my garden at all.
But to be organic you do still need to control pests to prevent damage to both edible crops and ornamental plants. So when, in the last issue of Gardeners' World magazine, I advised readers to collect and dispose of snails found in compost bins, I didn't imagine this would upset anybody.
But apparently by recommending the disposal of snails I am personally responsible for the demise of the song thrush throughout the British Isles!
The thrush is my favourite garden bird, but surely to be politically correct I'm not now expected to collect snails from inside my compost bin and distribute them around the garden in the hope of attracting a song thrush to feed.
My garden, like many others, provides ideal breeding conditions for snails, but this isn't actually the main reason I garden. So if I do come across snails I do dispose of them, although I hasten to add that I never use pellets for this job.
Just for the record, I regularly spot beautiful thrushes in my garden, and the remnants of snail shells indicating that they've been feeding, so clearly there are still snails around.
The thrush is my favourite garden bird, but surely I can't be expected to collect and distribute snails around the garden in the hope of attracting a song thrush to feed? Am I really in the wrong for disposing of snails I discover?
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