Well Gurney, my alternative for flies and blowies is to not cut the bottle in half, but leave the bottle cap on and poke a small hole in the side of the bottle, just big enough for the offending critter to go in, but then they fly around, rather than crawl around the sides of the bottle and the odds are pretty slim that they will find the hole to get back out. It helps if you leave the edges ragged or a flap on the inside because that acts as a baffle, as well, to limit their chances of escape. You need to put something stinkily attractive to flies in the bottle too, to spark their interest and make them want to go inside to investigate.

I forgot to say, too, that when I want to do the Dalek impression and "Exterminate! Exterminate!" I just pour some hot water into the bottle and bye, bye flies.

I was wondering, Joybell, if you put the hole in the CD spindle cover a little higher up the side and then rig up a bit of a ramp somehow so the snails crawl up, go inside and then have to find the way back up to the opening to get back out again, maybe you can double the odds of them not crawling back out again.

Oh, and talking of snails, I think it's funny that a small goods van produced by Nissan is called an S-Cargo. If you do an image search on Google for Nissan S-Cargo you'll see that it is indeed a little snail-like in appearance. Clever name.

Helen