About Keep Wales Tidy's Tidy Towns' work in Cardiff

Hi, my name is Chris Partridge and I am Keep Wales Tidy's Tidy Towns Project Officer for Cardiff. Activities we undertake are often in partnership with Cardiff Council's Parks Department (both waste services and Community Park Rangers) and Street Cleansing. We have organised events for several businesses across Cardiff and is happy to accommodate future requests. For more information you can contact Chris on 07717 412 270 or by Email: chris.partridge@keepwalestidy.org You can also follow me on Twitter for upcoming events @CardiffKWT

Monday, 31 January 2011

31.01.11 Bute Park Woodland Management: Grey Squirrel Mayhem

Fresh from the same site just 48 hours before, staff from Keep Wales Tidy’s Tidy Towns initiative joined five volunteers from LS Healthcare and Katie Tuite-Dalton (Bute Park’s Community and Outreach Officer) and rolled up their sleeves to tackle an area of mysteriously dead and damaged woodland.

The grey squirrel is commonly seen in Bute park often raising excited exclamations from children and adults alike. Sadly, these cute woodland creatures in their high numbers also cause massive amounts of damage to some of the trees in Bute Park. The aim of the volunteers initially was to remove non-native maple species from a section of woodland near Blackweir. Quickly, we realized much of the regeneration had been killed by squirrel damage. To make these safe, we felled several of these trees using skills the volunteers had be trained with over the past few months as part of the Cardiff Friday Mornings Project. The trees, including the maples, were all stacked neatly into a habitat pile.



Chris Partridge said, “We worked very hard today to help improve the health and wellbeing of this beautiful woodland by removing the non-native trees as well as the gnawed trees. However, the damage to further trees in Bute Park caused by our grey furry visitors is likely to continue unchecked”.

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