Some slow release fertilizer contain actual liquid inside the balls. You can literally “pop them” and liquid fertilizer will come out. They aren’t eggs, and i’ve seen some come in gray and yellow colours but i‘m sure the whole rainbow exists. Someone mentioned root nodules, which would only be the case if they were directly connected to the root and looked like a hard, solid tuber inside (these are common but not limited to alocasias and calatheas for example). Fungus gnat eggs are practically microscopic, and unless your plants have direct access to the outdoors it is unlikely (but still possible) for it to be snail or slug eggs. What most of you are seeing are simply slow release fertilizer, if it’s truly bothersome you can buy organic potting mix that doesn’t contain any. Any generic potting mix from your nursery or garden centre, such as promix and miracle grow will contain these fertilizer balls and likely already in the soil your plant comes in from the nursery or store. You can literally sift through your new bag of potting mix and find them. If you truly believe them to be eggs, again unlikely, scoop them out and wait for them to hatch lol. You probably will not have bug babies but maybe you can gain some peace of mind.

Sounds like a really cool title for a children's book. I'd say you have VOLES, my dear. When you water or it rains, they will tunnel through the soft earth, munching on your plant's roots. Moles and gophers and shrews (and snakes of all kinds), use their nifty tunnels to get around your yard subteranean - like a handy-dandy animal subways. Crickets use them, earthworms, and slugs, too, and lots of other critters. Some good for your garden and some that don't seem to be so good. I've lost tuberose salvias and my favorite tea roses; tulips and petunias, even cactus roots. If its edible, they will eat it! I've tried various things, like tarpaper collars around my roses and concrete or rock barriers, even strips of sheet metal buried around them. The tarpaper worked pretty good until it disentigrated, but eventually, mice burrowed through it and then it rotted to dirt. Flooding does no good, as those tunnels are hundreds of feet long. Those holes will never fill completely up. I've tried it. :) If you have a serious vole (or other rodent) problem, like I do, your yard may be completely undermined with tunnels that links with your neighbor's, and their neighbor's, and so on...hence you may find a flower in your yard (or weed) that you didn't plant or never saw before. Birds can bring carry them in or deposit them in your garden, via their poop, that's true, but so can rodents. Rodents carry seeds back and forth through those tunnels to and from your place. Keeping things in balance with Nature is what works best for me. If we can stop fighting all the elements of nature and work with it, we will get better results and enjoy gardening even more. I sink bottomless buckets in the ground for barriers for my big lilies, around berry bushes and roses, and even some of my garden plants, like my tomatoes, and that works really great. For shallow rooted plants that send out roots horizontally, these don't work so well. Planting daffodils, irises, liriope (Monkey grass), garlic, zinnias and stinky marigolds around the borders of my flower beds and/or around blueberry bushes, roses and strawberry beds, even apple trees, is about the only things I've done that works relatively well for an indefinite period of time, without killing the beneficial micro-organisms in the soil and harming animals like shrews and earthworms and preditory insects and snakes. Garlic really does a great job warding off rodents from my roses and they both mutually benefit from one another. Daffodils, irises, and liriope are poisonous so rodents just don't dig 'em. I think we gardeners and farmers will always have our challenges, but isn't that what makes our successes so awesome! ~ SweetAnnie4u

When I was stationed in San Diego I observed both Ground Squirrels and Pocket Gophers quite closely. Our yard backed up to an empty field behind a church and the place was overrun with both types of critters. When I was 10 I spent the summer in Canada with my grandparents and observed Chipmunks even more closely as my grandfather had them trained to climb into his shirt pocket to get sunflower seeds. they would drag stuff off my paper plate while I was eating at the picnic table. Pocket gophers are different from ground squirrels and munks. The ground squirrel bears a resemblance to the munk only in that it has stripes on its back but the two species are not the same color and the GS gets quite a bit larger than the munk. I also observed that the ground squirrels would attack birds that strayed too close to their tunnel entrances and try to drag then into their burrows. The implication to me is that they are not averse to adding a little fresh protein to their diets. This observation also answered the question of why there seemed to be an abnormal number of 1 legged or footed birds around. The pocket gophers were an absolute menace to our vegetable garden and I watched one day while one of them tried to pull a young pumpkin vine into its burrow. Being a southeastern boy I tried to flood them out and once ran the hole full blast into a hole by the patio. It ran for over an hour and water never surfaced out of any of the other holes. I gave up on that technique. A combination of Mole traps and a pellet gun kept the population down a little but there were too many gopher mujahideen who came from the church yard to continue the battle for our garden. The fighting never stopped and I'm sure continued when the new tenants took possession of the back yard and garden plot.

Well, Chas, the leaf looks like a caterpillar of some sort, but as for the bits of stick underneath, well, reminds me of what white cockatoos do to my African Tulip tree and other things around the place; they take a few bites and then just drop the rest and start on a new one - seed pod usually of the African Tulip tree. Bird damage? When do you find it Chas, early in the morning? what birds are about? any caterpillars? Looks like something is chewing the stems in half and then just dropping the bits to rot! Ummmm, suspect it's a nocturnal something or other. Dunno what else, what about going out at night with a torch, surprising what you can find in your garden at night mate!