Reptile Forum, Reptile Classifieds - CaptiveBred

[Peter Parrot]

I posted this a couple of days back but it seemed to vanish along with a couple of other posts. Something to do with the site being down I expect. Anyway, here it is reposted;



I just wanted to share a small success story. Back during April 07 a project that the charity I work for were involved with required some attention. A small wildlife garden in a junior school was vandalised by a local disgruntled youth. Most of the damage was easily remedied but the pond had been sabotaged to the point where the water level was dangerously low. April was far from the ideal time of year to be disturbing the pond but we had little other choice than to do so.

In short, we dug a temporary "bath sized" holding pond, and transferred as much of the mature plant life (comprising of buckets full of hornwort and a substantial amount of mature marginals) from the rapidly draining original pond across to it as possible. We also painstakingly transferred as much of the animal life as possible which included over 200 palmate newts and copious amounts of invertebrates (which were predominately living in the root sytems of the marginal plants that we transferred) and one lone common frog. 10 days later a completely refurbished pond had the entire contents of the temporary holding pond , including water, transferred across to it. The mature plant life gave the "new" pond far more of an instantly established feel to it than I had imagined would be possible. Regular visits afterwards always showed numerous palmate newts present. Throughout the rest of the Spring and early Summer it was no problem to count several individuals rising for gulps of air in a five minute period.

So all in all a mini victory for the amphibians as it could have been disasterous.

These photographs were taken two weeks after the emergency refit.
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YSBRYDOLI POBL, GWELLA LLEOEDD
INSPIRING PEOPLE, IMPROVING PLACES
www.btcv.org
Visit our website - Gwelwch ein Gwefan
www.btcvcymru.org
Llinell Gymorth / Helpline: 08702 40 48 41

[kroakykaren]

Superb well done
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[MJ]

Excellent stuff mate it's awesome to see a victory for newts and other native water life!
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Paul

For all your Tropical plant and Naturalistic Vivarium needs please enjoy Urban Bromeliad

[alastair]

really good effort. was the charity btcv? I used to do volunteer work for them when i was a student
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so many morphs, so little money
1.1 Beardies
2.1 Homo sapiens jnr
0.1 royals owned by mikey

[James]

great work, finally some good news for the amphibians

[jamie_s]

well done peter,you deserve a big pat on the back for that one mate
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www.jamieswordsreptiles.com

[Peter Parrot]

Thanks for the positive comments everyone.