Plasdwr threatens the Great Crested Newt and other wildlife
Popular TV presenter and naturalist Iolo Williams has spoken out against the Plasdwr housing development proposal that threatens to destroy countryside in the green belt area of Cardiff northwest. Plasdwr is being promoted as “Cardiff’s garden city” but Williams calls the plan “sheer madness.”
He points out that already endangered wildlife species, including the great crested newt (Triturus cristatus), the barn owl (Tyto alba) and the lesser horseshoe bat (Rhinolophus hipposideros) all have populations that depend on habitats that exist on land scheduled for use, if the building of 6,000 new houses goes ahead.
Great Crested Newt (Photo: Public Domain)
The plan of Redrow Homes is to build all over countryside bordering on St Fagans, Fairwater (Pentrebane), Danescourt and Radyr, all on the outskirts of the north-west of Cardiff. There are large ponds in the fields and farmland affected by the housing development proposals, ponds, such as the Pentrebane Cottage Ponds, that are known to be used by the great crested newt, an amphibian that has been declining fast in the UK and is protected by law.
Barn Owl (Photo: Public Domain/Pixabay)
The barn owl is another British species of wildlife that has been dropping in numbers throughout the UK and is the subject of conservation schemes set up to protect this beautiful nocturnal bird of prey. Williams has pointed out that this magnificent bird is found in the area threatened by the development of the land.
The lesser horseshoe bat is one of the smallest mammals in the world. It roosts in colonies and in the UK, Wales is one the parts it is found. This bat is absent from Scotland. Threats to its survival include disturbance and destruction of roosting locations and the loss of suitable habitats in which it can forage for its prey, which are small insects and spiders. This bat flies low over the ground and will grab small creatures it can eat off of rocks and bushes.
Cardiff Council and the Local Development Plan (LDP)
Cardiff Council are favouring developers over the wishes of residents of the city when it comes to its LDP. A report by Ruth Mosalski for WalesOnline points out that Cardiff’s Civic Society has claimed that Cardiff Council “ignores the public.” Many residents of the city are worried about these development plans and have voiced their concerns. It is not only because of the threatened destruction of the countryside and the wildlife it is a home to that is causing worries, but also because of the very real problem of traffic. Roads into and out of the west of Cardiff are already experiencing traffic chaos and adding another 6,000 houses and a potential 10,000 more cars can only acerbate the problem turning it into an absolute nightmare. Cardiff simply does not have the roads in place to cope with the increased traffic.
Increased traffic causes increased air pollution too. At present, the growth of lichen and mosses on tree trunks and walls throughout the city shows that the air quality has improved, but a dramatic increase in the number of vehicles using Cardiff’s overburdened roads will halt and reverse this, as well as being a known cause of ill-health for people.
There is a solution
There is no denying that people need somewhere to live and that more housing should be built. However, none of the problems the Plasdwr development will create have to exist because a viable solution already exists. As Williams points out in the video, there are brownfield sites in Cardiff where houses can be built instead. Also there are empty buildings that could be used to provide housing. He asks concerned residents to get in touch with their AMs and local MPs and to put in their complaints.
Councillor for Radyr & Morganstown Community Council and Plaid Cymru candidate for Radyr and Morganstown, Michael Deem, is campaigning against the destruction of the green belt, and so is Neil McEvoy, who is Assembly Member For South Wales Central at Y Senedd and County Councillor for Fairwater.
When I was a boy, as well as tropical fish, stick insects and exotic silk moths I kept as pets, I also used to keep newts. In spring, which was the season for newts, I used to catch them in a large pond in a local park, which was called Fairwater Park, but was referred to by me and my friends as “The Dell.” I always used to wear my Wellingtons for trips to this park and carry a bucket with me, into which I put whatever I caught.
Melissa Houghton taking photos at Fairwater Park pond (Photo: Steve Andrews)
The pond in Fairwater Park was very untended by humans and had large masses of grass growing in it and around the edges, it had willow trees and bushes, and brambles coming right down to the water in some parts. It was wild and how it should be! It had large clumps of bulrushes and much of the water surface was covered in floating leaves of amphibious persicary, broad-leaved pondweed and duckweed. The pond was basically full of aquatic vegetation with very little open water. It had plenty of brown stinking mud and would ooze methane bubbles when you stepped in it.
Nepa cinerea the Water Scorpion (Photo: Public Domain)
Many species of aquatic life lived in this pond. There were ramshorn snails, water scorpions, water mites, water bugs and diving beetles, pond-skaters, water measurers and water crickets, caddis fly larvae in their cases made from broken bits of vegetation and water snail shells, and medicinal leeches that can suck your blood.
These leeches, by the way, are now a very rare species in Britain. I am pretty sure, without checking current statistics, that many of the other species I have listed have drastically declined in numbers too.
But getting back to Fairwater Park pond, as it once was, it was an ideal habitat for newts. All three species found in Britain bred there. You could find common newts, palmate newts and great crested newts, which last-named species is now endangered, and often gets in news stories because it has been found somewhere that was scheduled for development.
I used to catch newts, mainly by hand. I would part the weeds, spot a newt and swiftly grab it. I took my captures home and kept them in aquariums I had set up for them. In those days, you could legally catch and keep these amphibians, but this is not the case now, and for good reasons, because there are a lot less newts around now, when compared to the numbers in the UK when I was a boy.
What I loved about newts was their amazing colours. The male common and great crested newts have high frilly crests and underneath their bodies they have orange bellies spotted with black. Palmate newt males have dark webbing on their hind feet that can grow so much that it looks like they have squares of skin around their toes. They also have tiny thin filaments sticking out the end of their tails. I really don’t know why. Female palmate newts look very like female common newts but there is a difference, though it is hard to explain. The female palmates are an olive-brown or dark brown with pale bellies. The common newt females are a different shade of brown and slightly more colourful underneath. Newts have little hands and cute sparkling eyes. They have to swim up to the surface every now and then to take a gulp of air. They are fascinating to watch. The females have no crests and are not colourful like the males, but they have their own charm. They lay their eggs in water plants, carefully wrapping each egg in a leaf.
I used to enjoy keeping the newt tadpoles too and watching them grow bigger and bigger, and losing their gills to become miniature newts that could leave the water, just like their parents could do. I used to feed my adult newts mostly on very small earthworms and the newt tadpoles fed on daphnia, which are tiny crustaceans, also known as water fleas.
Nodding Burr-marigold (Photo: Public Domain)
Sometimes I found sick newts in the pond. Sometimes they had seeds of the spiky burr-marigold embedded in their mouths. I could sometimes help the newt by prying the seed out but not always. Also some newts had dropsy and their bodies became very swollen so they could not swim properly. They would sadly die but there were plenty more healthy ones.
It used to sadden me, though, seeing what some boys used to do. They would catch great crested newts, which they incorrectly called salamanders, and put them on the grass where they would take turns in throwing knives at the poor amphibians. These boys took pleasure in the suffering they caused the newts and it made me sad but I was too scared to stop them because I knew they would beat me up. I didn’t like a lot of boys. I found them violent and destructive. I much preferred being out in nature on my own or with a few good friends I trusted. Boys I didn’t know, and many boys I did know, I began seeing as a source of potential danger to be avoided. This was to go into my ideas about male humans, so I grew up thinking men and boys were more dangerous than women and girls.
But getting back to the newts, it was many years later and I was in my late teens but still living at home. I had seen an advert for the Cardiff Naturalists Trust and thought it would be a good idea to get in touch with these people to tell them about the great crested newts, which I knew were very rare. Incidentally, my good friend and fellow author C.J. Stone has also told this story. Anyway, I wrote a letter and sent it to the address of the organisation, and in due course, I received a reply from someone who was in charge, thanking me for my information but saying he had done a “preliminary pond dip” but had found no evidence of great crested newts in the pond, as I had described. He asked if it would be OK if he called on me so I should show him some of these newts and asked me to catch a few. I agreed to this and caught some great crested newts and put them in a bucket. When the man and his wife called at my parents’ house I was all ready to show them I was correct. The man in charge of the Cardiff Naturalists group was amazed but could see for himself that I had some specimens of this species. He asked if we could go up to the pond so I could show him how I caught them. I put my boots on and off we set in his car. When we got to the pond I waded slowly into the water, parted some of the floating grasses and weeds, spotted a newt and grabbed it. “Got one,” I said, as I put the newt into my bucket. “And another,” I added as I caught one more. Within about 10 minutes I had managed to catch several great crested newts and showed the man from the naturalists group how I did it. He was impressed and thanked me again, saying he would see to it that some work was done to make sure the pond was a safe habitat for this rare species of amphibian in future. I was glad I had got in touch with the Cardiff Naturalists and felt proud of my efforts. My attitude was to change drastically though many weeks later when I saw what had been done to the pond in The Dell. Large masses of weeds and grass had been dredged out and thrown on the banks, big spaces of open water had been created, and marginal vegetation had been cut back or destroyed. The pond was no longer wild, like Mother Nature intended. It had been cleaned up and made to fit what people thought it should be like. People like big spaces of water but newts don’t because they can easily be seen by predators.
They like weedy ponds where they can hunt, look for mates, and lay their eggs. I regretted my part in having alerted the local organisation to this, and have carried that regret onward because there were never anywhere near as many newts there after that. In the years that followed further work was done at the pond. Water lilies were planted, a big space of open water was kept that way, a wooden landing stage was erected, so people could look out over the pond more easily, and the grass and plants that grew around the edges were often cut back. Now admittedly the pond looked a lot nicer, more like a pond you might have in a painting or on a postcard perhaps, but a lot of wildlife stayed away, apart from some ducks.
Ducks at The Dell (Photo: Steve Andrews)
Footnote: The above article is taken from an unfinished book of memoirs I started writing. Fortunately in many ways, due to the economic crisis and government cuts, the pond is not being tended to any more and vegetation has returned all around it and in it, as you can see in my photos, which were taken in 2015.
When I was a boy and in my early teens, besides various caterpillars, silk-moths and stick insects, I also had a lot of tropical fish. In fact, I had tanks all around my bedroom. I used to breed many species of fish, including angel fish, keyhole cichlids, golden barbs and paradise fish.
Keyhole Cichlids
Some types of fish eat their eggs and so it was vitally important for me to be able to get the parents out as soon as they had laid their eggs. I used to stay up into the early hours watching for this to happen. My mother used to get annoyed and would tell me I should be asleep because I had school in the morning. I never cared about school because my insects and fish were my world and what was important to me.
It was in my early teens that I really got into keeping tropical fish and had a school friend called Roger Wiggins who used to keep tropicals too. We used to read magazines for aquarists and find out about fish farms in America and read about specialist breeders of difficult species, and we would fantasise about one day running our own tropical fish businesses. By that time I had started selling surplus fish that I had reared in the tropical fish shops in Cardiff, and sometimes I would supply them with bags of water lettuce, a floating plant I used to get so much of it covered the tops of the water in my tanks. They never used to pay me much for the fish and plants but it was a boost to my ego to be able to think I was successful at being a supplier, even if on a really small scale. The men that ran the shops knew that I knew my stuff too. It all appealed to my youthful sense of pride.
Roger and I used to order exotic aquatic plant species from mail order companies too. It was exciting seeing what the plants were actually like and to find out how well we could grow them. Often enough our efforts failed but that did not stop us. I remember being fascinated by the names we read in ads and wondering what these plants would really be like. Some like the aptly named four-leaf clover turned out to be really great and easy to grow aquatic plants but others just withered away.
Four-leafed Clover
I also remember going to Newport to a tropical fish shop in the Pill area of the city. Tachbook Tropicals I think it was. It was worth making this trip by train, not just for a day out, but because for some reason this shop always had fish you could not find in any of the shops in Cardiff. I remember getting an Egyptian mouthbreeder or mouthbrooder and a skunk botia from Newport.
Egyptian Mouthbrooder
The mouthbreeder was a female and I had her for years. Sadly I never managed to get a male and though she used to spawn on her own her efforts were wasted because the unfertilised eggs died and after she realised this she ate them. It was sad seeing this dedicated mother fish with a mouthful of eggs, not able to eat and expecting her eggs to hatch into tiny babies but never have any hatch out. My Auntie Elsie from London who used to often visit used to call this fish “Ugly” but I couldn’t see why. But it was a male I needed and for some reason every time I saw these mouth-breeders for sale there were never any males. There were unexplained mysteries in the tropical fish business. In Cardiff they were never on sale in either sex. I never understood why because it was an interesting fish, easy to keep and in most tropical fish books.
I remember something else that happened that involved my Auntie Elsie and a fish I had at the time. It showed me something about how human opinions can be so very wrong and how animals and plants are built to survive and repair themselves if hurt. I had an upside down catfish.
These fish are named that way because they do swim upside down. The one I had was a greedy fish and was always on the lookout for more food but one day it had a terrible accident that was to cause it to stop eating. What happened was that for some reason, which I cannot remember, the fish was very alarmed and dived down fast towards the bottom of the tank. In its speed it failed to watch out for a jagged rock and cut its belly open. It was really badly hurt because I could see its innards that spilled out through the cut it sustained. My Auntie saw me upset and asked what was wrong and I told her what happened. She took one look at the catfish and said I should do the right thing, and put it out of its misery, because there was no way it would survive. I didn’t want to kill my fish. I hoped so badly it would get better. I decided to give it a chance, though I could clearly see that the odds were against it pulling through. My catfish retreated to a corner of the tank, stopped eating and swimming about and just stayed there, hanging almost motionless in the corner. The days rolled onward and the fish didn’t die. It didn’t resume its normal lifestyle of swimming around and looking for food but it didn’t die. What happened was a miracle. The guts of the fish were very gradually being pulled back inside its belly, and the skin was closing over. Eventually, after about a week, wound had closed and all was left was a scar. The catfish gradually started to take an interest in life again and moved around in the tank, and most importantly, began eating again. Within a few weeks, it was back to normal and even the scar on its belly vanished. I was so glad I had not listened to Auntie Elsie, and that I had given my fish a chance.
But getting back to my friend Roger and our shared hobby; we had an ongoing mystery. You see, we never saw any killifish for sale, though we read about these unusual fish in books and magazines. Because of their habits of laying eggs that need to be kept semi-dry to replicate the conditions in the wild where ponds dry up, we assumed these species really were so difficult that this is why they were not available in South Wales. These were fish it was probably too hard to keep and breed. This is what we thought was the reason why people do not keep killies. Many years later I was to find out that this assumption was wrong. It was possible to order killifish by post, as eggs or adult fish. Some types were very hard to keep but others were easy. I became a member of the British KIllifish Association in the 1990s. This meant I received the society’s monthly journal and could read the ads and respond. I could order eggs from other members. The killifish eggs were in peat and used to be contained in small plastic containers or in plastic sachets. They could be sent through the mail this way. The excitement came from hatching the tiny fish out and seeing if you could rear them successfully. Some types like the Nothobranchius species were exceedingly colourful with the males having red tails and bright blue bodies. I was successful in breeding and rearing quite a few species, including some of the larger bottom-spawning aphyosemion species, such as the Blue Gularis.
I was proud of my success with these fish. I sold a lot to a local fish shop where I knew the owner Neil. Sadly though he was to tell me that many of them died. I never sold him any more after that. These fish I found easy to keep could not survive in a tank in a shop. perhaps they did need specialist care after all?
I have another fish story I would like to share. I had a pair of some type of mouthbrooding cichlid. I say “some type,” because they were not identified when I bought them and I never did find out what they were. There are a lot of African mouthbreeder cichlids and these were mostly a yellowish colour and it was clear which the male was because he was a lot bigger and he used to dig pits in the gravel, which is something male fish do to attract mates. I also could see that the other was the female because the fish used to breed but sadly, for some reason, I never discovered, they always lost their eggs which failed to hatch. Nevertheless, this pair of fish seemed OK in my community tank and never bothered other fish I had. I mention this because many cichlids are known for being aggressive and cannot be kept with other species. But all of this, I have just told you, is not what this story is about. What I really want to share is what happened when the female fish died. I cannot remember what was wrong with her but I can vividly remember what happened to the male. It was as if he lost his will to live, like a brokenhearted human it seemed he no longer had any reason to be alive without his mate. Now, what you probably don’t know is that there are many fish that are monogamous and faithful to their mates. There are fish that mate for life and are far more loyal to their partners than many married humans can be. Anyway, what happened with my male cichlid, and how I could see he was grieving badly, was that he stopped eating, stopped showing an interest in swimming around the tank, stopped digging in the gravel, and like the upside down catfish I have already told you about, he went into a corner of the tank and just lay on the gravel. After seeing him behave this way for several days I thought he was pining away and would die, but I was wrong. Something amazing happened that showed that fish can respond to humans and that one species can communicate with another.
My friend Sioned used to call at my house on a regular basis. One day she called round and had gone in the kitchen for something, which was where the tank was I had my cichlid in. She asked me what was the matter with my fish. I told her that he was very sad and grieving because his wife had died. I said I thought he would die too because he wasn’t eating. Sioned was horrified and said she was going to see if she could help save him. She started gently tapping on the side of the tank and talking to the fish through the glass. My friend repeated this every time she visited which was every day that week. My heart-broken male cichlid began to respond. He left lying in the corner and would come over to see Sioned through the glass pane. Eventually after a few days he started eating again, and swimming about. He even began digging in the gravel. probably in the hope that his mate would somehow return, or maybe to attract a new mate. This never happened, of course, and I was unable to get any more of this type of fish, though I looked in the local tropical fish shops. As a result of my friend Sioned spending time trying to talk to my male cichlid and succeeding, he went on to live many months more.
Footnote: The story above is taken from an unfinished book of memoirs about nature.
