Prague has its first private nature preserve
The sounds of a nightingale, a reed warbler and a toad. Nothing special in the Czech countryside. But it is rather unusual to hear all of them at once in one location in a city. Yet there is such a site in Prague, where you can find forty species of birds and a large number of amphibians, many of them protected. It is a small swamp squeezed in between three railway lines on the outskirts of Prague, facing the danger of succumbing to the pressure of the sprawling city.
"The area of "Triangle" on the outskirts of Prague is a naturally valuable area that is worth protecting because of a lot of birds and especially water birds and amphibians living in this area. And our organisation will take care of this area to protect it in future years, to make some arrangements so that the pressure of the civilisation is diminished and the valuable elements protected. In this sense we are trying to follow the example of land trusts that are practiced in the United Kingdom."
The activists have pledged to clean the area of rubbish, take care of the wildlife there and open the "Triangle" to the public. The Czech Union of Nature Conservation wants to collect 10 million crowns in the next five years and continue buying endangered areas with valuable and rare wildlife. The next one on the list is a hundred-year-old fir-beech forest in the White Carpathians.
For more information, see www.mistoproprirodu.cz.
