what I did at the weekend

I was at a bit of a loose end this afternoon, and it was a nice day, so I took myself out to the Newport Wetlands nature reserve down at the mouth of the Usk, no more than 20 minutes drive from the house. This has been tarted up quite a bit in recent years, partly (apparently) to offset the loss of habitat associated with the construction of the Cardiff Bay barrage; the reed beds are old storage lagoons for fuel ash from the Uskmouth power station, which still looms somewhat incongruously over one end of the nature reserve with a massive cat's cradle of fizzing power lines attaching it (presumably) to the National Grid. Beyond the general unsightliness and the possibility of taking off from your reedy nest and flying smack into a pylon, any worries about "bad vibes" from the power lines affecting the wildlife are largely illusory; it's just an odd juxtaposition. In any case, any notions of man interfering with "nature" here are absurd, as this is an almost entirely man-made environment anyway.

Now, I'm not a hardcore wildlife enthusiast - I'll be as excited as the next man if a pine marten pops out onto the path in front of me and starts doing the dance of the seven veils, but in general I don't have the patience - a minute or two into an all-night badgerathon and I get a bit twitchy. However, I spotted a few things of interest:

• yer basic coots and a few ducks - a few bog-standard mallards but a few of what I think were shelducks
• swifts - hundreds of them engaged in archetypal swiftish swooping about hoovering up insects behaviour
• a cuckoo - didn't see it, but heard it; and it was a real one, none of your cheap imitation collared dove or wood pigeon nonsense
• a couple of nice willow trees growing out of drainage ditches. "Willow likes to have its feet wet" is one of my collection of old country sayings. The other one is as follows: "If you see a rook on its own, it's a crow; and if you see a whole bunch of crows, they're rooks".

None of the fauna I've just described stayed still long enough to be photographed - I did manage to catch the willow tree though. Nonetheless I did get some photos of the general landscape, and here they are.

Just to illustrate the man-made nature of the landscape, here are a couple of flagrantly copyright-defying scanned images from Ordnance Survey maps - one from a 1948 1 inch to 1 mile edition, and one from my latest 1:25000 Explorer. The lighthouse is a good point of reference. Here's Google Maps' aerial view.