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Garden critters

Pitfall traps will catch a variety of predatory mini beasts in a garden.

Comes the dawn and the birds are up early. So is Bill Oddie, as he's off to check some yoghurt pots he buried in the garden. He empties them into a tray to see what he's caught. There are little centipedes scampering around, and the rather more flowing motion of the millipede. But they don鈥檛 come much more impressive than this guy - a violet ground beetle, occasionally found on the ground in gardens. It鈥檚 more a violet trim really. Frankly, these guys will eat just about anything. They are very belligerent. Bill has a scorpion on his finger. Technically speaking, it鈥檚 called a false scorpion, and let鈥檚 face it, it's extremely tiny. This little chap eats mites, tiny little mites. They鈥檙e like minuscule velvet cushions with legs. Woodlice are like little armadillos, but they鈥檇 better look out because here comes a woodlouse-eating spider, Dysdera. They really do have vicious jaws. Bill's heard that they actually do bite people and sometimes give you some nasty swellings - and the spider proves it by biting his finger. If it can give him a nasty nip, it could presumably snap a woodlouse in half with one chomp of its mighty jaws. There are all these creatures in the garden and in nature in general, and in one way or another they all kind of depend on each other.

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