{"id":558354,"date":"2026-04-30T07:53:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-30T07:53:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/558354\/"},"modified":"2026-04-30T07:53:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-30T07:53:08","slug":"concerns-over-swans-eating-dumped-mouldy-food-in-caversham","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/558354\/","title":{"rendered":"Concerns over swans eating dumped mouldy food in Caversham"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">CWRS co-founder Graham Neale said dumping at the site near Caversham Bridge was first witnessed by a local volunteer about two months ago.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;The guy enticed the swans over with bird feed&#8230; then once all the swans were over, he started getting open his boot and throwing all kinds of mouldy food,&#8221; he explained.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;But it wasn&#8217;t just a few weeks old, it was completely covered in green mould, disgusting.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;He was throwing that in the river and [the volunteer] told him not to, and then she tried to get as much out of the river as she could.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">He said volunteers saw other people doing the same thing on three subsequent occasions, and when challenged they would say it was cheaper to throw food waste into the river than pay a private contractor.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Neale said: &#8220;They told us that, but they wouldn&#8217;t give us their names and addresses, obviously. So that&#8217;s when we knew there is a big problem.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">CWRS then put up signs in the area to dissuade the practice, though two weeks ago Neale says he still came across a couple carrying bin bags of mouldy food by the river.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CWRS co-founder Graham Neale said dumping at the site near Caversham Bridge was first witnessed by a local&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":558355,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":["post-558354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=558354"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558354\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/558355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=558354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=558354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=558354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}