BS: Joy's Handy Snail Trap. Music related

Subject: BS: Joy's Handy Snail Trap. Music related
From: Joybell
Date: 02 Feb 09 - 12:42 AM

Maybe I'm not the first to invent this -- then again maybe I am.

Joy's Recycled Clever Snail Trap

Take a cd spindle with clear plastic cover that locks on.
Take cover off.
Cut a snail-sized doorway in the plastic cover, at the bottom.
Place snail killer on the base bit.
Screw plastic top back on.
Place, right side up, in garden.

The trap stays dry and away from birds, pets and reptiles.

Cheers, Joy

Subject: RE: BS: Joy's Handy Snail Trap. Music related
From: katlaughing
Date: 02 Feb 09 - 01:00 AM

If I had a snail problem, I would use it. That is ingenious!

Subject: RE: BS: Joy's Handy Snail Trap. Music related
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 02 Feb 09 - 01:24 AM

I don't use bait, I use beer. Anything else that gets into the bowl can usually get back out again, but that is very clever with teh spindle. Snails and small slugs can really mess up the greens in your garden around here. But I'm so generous a gardener, I throw these rude interlopers a party every so often. They die happy. :)

SRS

Subject: RE: BS: Joy's Handy Snail Trap. Music related
From: Joybell
Date: 02 Feb 09 - 02:06 AM

I tried the beer but I found I was drowning lizards -- even with a stone island in the beer. Also the snails ignored it. I do still use beer in some areas.
Thanks Kat and SRS I'm rather proud of the idea and the spindles look so useful, I hate to throw them away.
Cheers, Joy

Subject: RE: BS: Joy's Handy Snail Trap. Music related
From: Helen
Date: 02 Feb 09 - 05:30 AM

Necessity is the mother of invention. That's why I'm reluctant to throw out nifty bits of packaging which might inspire me to invent something useful.

I make a neat fruit fly trap out of a plastic softdrink/soda bottle. Take the bottle cap off and discard it. Cut all around the bottle about half way up. (Kitchen scissors are good for this.) Put about half a cup of water, some pieces of fruit or a few cut up pieces of banana skin, and maybe a little bit of sugar into the base half of the bottle. Invert the top half, with what was the top of the bottle now dropping into the lower half, keep it firmly together and wrap some duct tape around the join so that it is nice and tight. The fruit flies are attracted to the smell of the fruit and fly down into the bottle but cannot find the way back out again. It works for ordinary flies as well.

There needs to be enough height between the fruit and the hole in the top to prevent the critters from just flying straight back out again, so you don't need a lot of fruit. Just enough to send the smell out to attract the fruit flies.

Or you could buy a store-bought one for about $10 or $20. More fun making your own, though.

And my cockroach trap is simple too. A wine bottle with a little of the wine still left in the bottle, even a teaspoonful is enough. Red wine works better than white wine. Beer is good too. Wipe the inside top of the bottle with a little oil to make a slippery slide and put it somewhere where the cockies will find it. They go to the top of the bottle, try to get to the lovely smelly wine, and fall in. End of story.

Neither of these are music related, unless you serenade the cockies with a mournful rendition of La Cucaracha. I don't know which songs would make good serenades for fruit flies, or snails.

Subject: RE: BS: Joy's Handy Snail Trap. Music related
From: Joybell
Date: 02 Feb 09 - 04:05 PM

Thanks, Helen. Great ideas. Of course they're music related. See! You can't help it either. Talk about cockroaches and out pops a song about them. I was already singing La Cucaracha halfway through your post. Right after Shoo Fly Don't Bother me!.
There's a great site about these inventions but I like to combine music with them.
Cheers, Joy

Subject: RE: BS: Joy's Handy Snail Trap. Music related
From: Gurney
Date: 03 Feb 09 - 04:07 AM

I'd like to see the trap made so that the snails die inside it. Baited snails are eaten by song-thrushes and they die too.

I like song-thrushes.

Subject: RE: BS: Joy's Handy Snail Trap. Music related
From: Gurney
Date: 03 Feb 09 - 04:09 AM

Oh, baited snails kill hedgehogs, too. Takes them about three days to die, unconcious and breathing stentoriously.

Subject: RE: BS: Joy's Handy Snail Trap. Music related
From: Will Fly
Date: 03 Feb 09 - 05:59 AM

Could you make a little one-way snail flap, so that they can get in but not out - and they can't crawl sluggishly out to pass on their poor, poisoned little bodies to hapless snail-eaters?

However, would snails know it was a flap... mmm... might have to play some atractive snail-type music to attract 'em in. Now - what music would snails like to hear, I wonder.

Subject: RE: BS: Joy's Handy Snail Trap. Music related
From: Will Fly
Date: 03 Feb 09 - 06:00 AM

Perhaps "We shell not be moved..."

Subject: RE: BS: Joy's Handy Snail Trap. Music related
From: Joybell
Date: 03 Feb 09 - 03:59 PM

Thanks, Gurney and Will. They're important warnings.
I find the snails die inside the trap. Maybe we have a different type of poison. I'm careful to hide the trap under vegetation too. We don't have hedgehogs -- I wouldn't use snail bait if there was a chance of anything eating the baited snails. Here the only enemies of the snails are Ravens and Blue-tongue Lizards. Both hunt away from my enclosed vegetable garden.
Still ... I agree we need to be very careful with the use of any poison or indeed with all of our actions that impact on the natural world.
Cheers, Joy

Subject: RE: BS: Joy's Handy Snail Trap. Music related
From: Rowan
Date: 03 Feb 09 - 10:01 PM

Helen's drink bottles, cut differently, also make perfectly acceptable pollen traps, too.

Cheers, Rowan

Subject: RE: BS: Joy's Handy Snail Trap. Music related
From: Helen
Date: 04 Feb 09 - 04:16 AM

Sorry Rowan, but I don't know what a pollen trap is. Trapping nasty pollen before it wreaks havoc in the hayfeverish population, perhaps?

Enlightenment awaits?

Subject: RE: BS: Joy's Handy Snail Trap. Music related
From: Rowan
Date: 04 Feb 09 - 07:46 PM

Nothing as nasty as that, Helen.

A colleague at work is interested in the current distribution of podocarps (a type of plant) in the Blue Mountains and how this might relate to their distribution (as indicated by analysis of pollen trapped in swamp sediments) in the early Holocene and late Pleistocene. One path to understanding involves checking the distribution of their pollen from current plant communities that have podocarps. The easy way is to construct pollen traps and deploy these according to a reasonable hypothesis; then you can analyse the distribution(s) of types and quantities of pollen collected.

In a past life we used to use beer bottles with their bottoms cut off and the necks stoppered with a cork; plastic soft drink bottles with screw caps are much easier and I've been collecting and constructing on his behalf.

But I can't (yet) think of any relevant songs or tunes.

Cheers, Rowan

Subject: RE: BS: Joy's Handy Snail Trap. Music related
From: Gurney
Date: 05 Feb 09 - 01:31 AM

Helen's flytrap, made with a large plastic bottle, works best if you arrange some sort of shade over the inverted bottleneck so that they can't see a way out there. Perhaps a good excuse for buying a cocktail with a wee umbrella in it? Fishheads work fastest, and a wineglassful of soapy water kills them quickly. Suffocation, I suppose.
There's a fiddle tune in Oz called 'The Blowfly.'

Subject: RE: BS: Joy's Handy Snail Trap. Music related
From: Helen
Date: 05 Feb 09 - 02:49 PM

Any songs about escargot?

Gurney, if you cut around the bottle so that there is more height in the base than the cone-shaped top then there is enough of a gap to make it difficult for them to fly out. Fruit flies tend not to fly straight up. It's only a problem if the fruit pieces are close enough to the bottle opening for them to be able to fly into it.

And thanks for the enlightenment, Rowan. Even more interesting than I imagined. And clever, too.

And Joybell, a friend of mine who lived on a property was poisoning a plague of mice at one stage and was asked by neighbours whether they were using a secondary poison, i.e. one which will kill a predator. She was horrified when she realised that the local owls had probably eaten the mice and died.

BTW, we get tawny frogmouth owls in the trees in our suburban yard. I have photos. And we have lots of native birds, as well as what I call "dropkicks", i.e. pesky Indian Mynah birds, and then there are the blue tongue lizards and the frogs in our pond, and lots of interesting spiders. One day I'm going to do what I saw an Oz biologist do on tv, and put slugs on the bathroom walls to eat the mould, and put a small reptile in the house - I think it was a gecko or something like that - to eat the flies.

Helen

Subject: RE: BS: Joy's Handy Snail Trap. Music related
From: Joybell
Date: 05 Feb 09 - 05:05 PM

Thanks Rowan. I had in mind some sort of fearsome beast with a yellow fuzzy nose.
Yes there are several studies on secondary poisoning. You do indeed need to be careful. Owls do prefer live food but many other birds don't care. Living with Snakes is a natural way of coping with mice -- outside. Poor Snakes get a bad press that's completely unjustified. (Mouse plagues can require different measures, unfortunatly.)
Huntsman Spiders do a good job of eating insects in our home and also Bats -- that live between the ceiling space and the roof. They often do a fly-around in the house before going outside. We have Ewings Tree Frogs living with us too. Speaking of soap -- it kills frogs -- clogs up their skin. You need to be careful with that too.
I met Leopard Slugs a while back. Huge attractive creatures. We found them eating scaps of apple on the kitchen bench. Being slugs they're a bit dim. I hand fed them with cheese. They waved their horns at my fingers. Amazing moment.
Isn't it great the things we share here.
Cheers, Joy

Subject: RE: BS: Joy's Handy Snail Trap. Music related
From: Gurney
Date: 05 Feb 09 - 05:28 PM

Helen. 'my' modification was intended for houseflies and blowflies. They need a larger type of bottle, and they may be a smidgen smarter than fruitflies. They don't drown themselves in a glass of wine, for starters! The wee sunshade is because they sometimes can find their way out again if the way is light. Bottles shaped like the old 'Coke' bottle snap together neatly.

I find it reprehensible that the housefly strolling on the butter is fresh from a walk on the dogshit next door.
It's not even OUR dogshit!

Subject: RE: BS: Joy's Handy Snail Trap. Music related
From: Rowan
Date: 05 Feb 09 - 05:34 PM

Living with Snakes is a natural way of coping with mice -- outside. Poor Snakes get a bad press that's completely unjustified. (Mouse plagues can require different measures, unfortunatly.)

Every spring the sun on a sheltered doorstep at work brings out a brown snake or two to catch up on some heat; they get relocated out in the bush. In wheat areas west of here a single brown snake is worth its weight in gold if you take into consideration the number of mice one snake can eat and thus the potential number of mice (given their breeding rates) potentially removed from feasting on your wheat in the paddock.

But you don't really want them around the house.

The flies that get into my place are usually followed by a Cunningham's skink, which cleans them up but also leaves more evidence of its diet than geckos would. Around here it gets a bit cold for geckos during winter. Sometimes I also get invaded by an Antechinus or two so I have to use an Elliott trap to catch them so I can release them at least 5km away; they can individually control a huge amount of area so you have to remove them to a location they haven't already mapped.

Cheers, Rowan

Subject: RE: BS: Joy's Handy Snail Trap. Music related
From: Helen
Date: 06 Feb 09 - 12:35 AM

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