Ever wondered - what do snails eat?

What do snails eat? Sadly, the answer is that snails eat whatever they want to eat, which is just about everything.
We have a number of mysteries in our garden, often deriving from the many gaps in our horticultural knowledge. We have some sort of nocturnal creature that eats eremophyllas, grevilleas, kangaroo paws and any sort of ornamental grasses.
It is not a possum and it is not a rabbit, because their toilet habits make them easy to identify. There are no such clues here. There are just severely shortened plants, and sometimes plants that simply vanish with trace. There are diggings in many parts of our place, or at least in the drier parts, small trenches about two inches deep, four inches wide and about nine or 10 inches long.
Strangely, the plants with a greyish foliage seem to be safe, or relatively so.
If you can tell me what it is I'll be forever in your debt, which won't do you any good at all, of course. We have the occasional deer, kangaroo and wallaby. We have echidnas and it is possible that we have a bandicoot or two.
In fact, if it eats gardens we have it here. I should apologise at this point to the echidnas, They seem to eat only ants and we have plenty of spare ants. We have some ants that seem as big as bulldogs and have a bite like a bolt cutter. They are big red ants, much larger that a Jumping Jack, with a temper like that of a wounded wild boar.
We can't do much about this mysterious nocturnal marauder. Trapping is forbidden. Shooting is frowned upon, probably most of all by our neighbours. Poisoning is not an option for a couple of reasons, one is that we all have dogs in this part of the world and dogs will eat anything – but not gardens. My Cocker is judged innocent. Well, he is not entirely innocent. He should be warning us of this midnight marauder that munches everything we labour to raise. The other reason for not poisoning, of course, is that it is a cruel way to kill anything, even things upon which I wish a violent end and eternity in torment.
Geraniums and pelargoniums are very similar and very easy to grow. They provide a splash of colour and like many 'golden oldies' we have many colourful hanging baskets on our back deck. We also have some very colourful birds.
The Eastern Rosellas do not attack the geraniums. The Lorikeets, while nasty, aggressive little blighters, do not attack any of the flowers. The Crimson Rosellas come in for a little birdseed from time to time but they have excellent table manners and only eat what they are given.
The King Parrots tear the geraniums to pieces. The leave the pelargoniums alone but they eat the moist inside of the geranium stems. That does give us a great many 'cuttings' on the deck to plant, I suppose. Why do they do this?
Why not the pelargoniums as well? They are big, arrogant parrots for the most part, and almost tame, but I love watching the aggressive little Lorikeets drive them away.
Chooks. Hens. Poultry. What some people call chickens. We like to let them roam during the day to do whatever chooks do when they are not laying eggs. Unfortunately this includes making dust-baths in the sunny area where we plant the everlastings every year. The dust-baths last, and even grow larger and deeper, until they approach the size of the Morwell Open Cut and the depth becomes so great the chook in residence cannot be seen.
These dust-baths are sought after (by the chooks) and create a little squabbling, but we learned to leave them alone. If we fill them in the chooks empty them out. Every time. We have given up - and it is rather nice to have a few chooks busy in the yard and talking to each other as they do. To us that is one of the happy sounds of childhood.
We are less happy during the slater season, which seems to run for about 12 months of the year. As the mulch breaks down and provides a home for worms and grubs it also provides a Camelot for slaters. Chooks just love eating slaters. They compete with the blackbirds to dig up and throw away mulch. It is normally, of course, thrown onto the driveway and the various paths. We rake and sweep it up knowing that we really are wasting our time.
Blackbirds do not belong here. They have no right to excavate in the mulch we put down, though their efforts in that direction are worthy of some grudging admiration. I am not guilty of avian xenophobia, either. Look at the exotic birds and the harm they do, or even just the annoyances they create. The Indian Mynah? The Sparrow? The Starling? If you have any of them at your place you are in bad company.
We have the occasional deer passing through, of course, but that is all they do. They just pass through. That does frighten m y dog, though, and that is embarrassing because he is safe inside and they are well and truly outside. He is supposed to be a guard dog of sorts, but Cocker Spaniels just don't make that particular grade.
Much as I like him Bentley, a blue-roan Cocker Spaniel, plays a small but destructive role. He buries bones in holes he digs half under the tree fern trunks. If he gets a sardine or tuna tin to clean he takes it away and leaves the highly-polished tin deep inside the roots of other plants. Sometimes he seems to dig holes just for the fun of it.
We occasionally get the neighbour's goats in the yard, friendly and amiable creatures that only eat the expensive stuff and the things that are precious to us. On the one occasion when Bentley did his job he drove the goats down to the neighbours' bottom gate, through it and up the slope, then out through the top gate and back into our garden, finishing up exactly where he started. He then came looking for praise though he had completely missed the point of goat herding.
The White Cockatoos, though are the worst in all sorts of well-known ways, but here they have another destructive habit. We found that the ew local Gang Gangs loved Bushy Yate seeds so we planted a dozen of these rather lovely little eucalypts to provide more Gang Gang food. Instead the Cockies work hard to finish pulling all the young fruit off our fruit trees and then come up to pull off the Yate flowers and throw on the ground,
We persevere. I need say no more.