What eats Cepaea snails?
Snails have many predators including song thrushes and bigger birds like magpies. Shrews, mice, rats and hedgehogs also eat them as well as insects including the glow worm and some beetles. The best known predator of Cepaea is the song thrush. They are not capable of crushing snails on their own or swallowing them whole with the shell. Song thrushes therefore have to smash the snail shell on a rock or stony surface to get at the snail inside. These pieces of rock are known as anvils and can be easily recognised by the shell fragments lying around them.
