The Garden Pond Blog

Great Crested Newts get a lot of bad press.

The stock newspaper story these days about these beautiful animals is ‘newts get in the way of my school/hospital/grandmothers funeral’ (you can add your own deserving cause here which is stopped or disrupted, at great cost, by the animals presence).

Just search the sceptical press for the word ‘newt’ and you will see what I mean (see here and here). And I sometimes feel they do have a bit of a point – for £60,000 we could build 100 new high quality, clean and unpolluted in the Million Ponds Project. And a million pounds – well, that’s a lot of new ponds.

So it was good to see a bit of sympathetic (if sad) coverage of crested newts getting into a local paper following the report here of Sally’s dead Great Crested Newts in her Shropshire garden.

This short paean to newts is from the Shropshire Star.

A dirty polluting pipe flowing into a new pond?

No, its a bat tunnel at water level leading to a pond-side summer roost, the breeze block construction below.

Pond-side summer bat roost

This is part of an innovative pond creation project taking place in Suffolk which I visited yesterday.

Spring is springing already in the south-west of England and south-west Wales as the first frog spawn appears.

Keep up to date with how things are progressing with Nature’s Calendar run by the Woodland Trust and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology.

Thanks to everyone who’s submitting Big Pond Thaw forms at the moment.

I’d been expecting a lull in returns, but as they’re still coming in pretty frequently we will hold on a bit longer before reporting back.

The Big Pond Dip 2009 results will be following soon after that – but as you can probably imagine things have been hectic and our timetable for reporting back has been a bit disrupted.

The authoritative BES policy website picked up the ponds report last week.

And the BES also noted another issue that we were keen to link to the generally poor quality of ponds.

And that is the fact that 75% of rivers and streams in England and Wales will fail new standards which define the range of plants, fish, invertebrates and algae you should find in clean and unpolluted rivers.

The Environment Agency says:

“Using the new classification system [for a thing called the Water Framework Directive], results for assessed rivers in England and Wales show that for overall ecological classification 26% of rivers are good or better, 60% are moderate, 12% are poor and 2% are bad.”

It’s worth noting that the new system is a five point scale with water bodies assessed as: bad, poor, moderate, good or high. In theory, all waters should be at ‘good’ or ‘high’ status. Most are not and, at present, virtually no rivers in England and Wales are ‘high’ status.

More information on the Environment Agency website.

Alongside Jeremy Cooke’s report we also filmed a short piece on the pollution problems facing ponds, and how we can make a real difference with new pond creation.

View it here.

For more information look at Pond Conservation’s Million Ponds Project.

Read my colleague Becca Cleaver’s comments on the reasons why amorous male frogs brave the cold weather in your pond….

See the comment ‘Becca on More frog info’.

See Jeremy Cooke’s report on the publication of the Countryside Survey Pond Report 2007.

The report was written jointly by the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) and Pond Conservation.

The Countryside Survey is jointly funded by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the Natural Environment Research Council and other statutory bodies.

Analysis of the pond data was jointly funded by Pond Conservation and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology.

Watch BBC Breakfast tomorrow to see more.

We’ll post more details of the report, by Pond Conservation and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, funded by Defra, tomorrow.

Hi Everyone

Just a very quick reply to Heather – why do frogs hang about in ponds in the cold?

The answer is that this is a safe and warm place (relative to the air) which, as long as the water remains oxygenated, is a good place to overwinter.

And frogs have adaptations to this environment – being underwater in winter – though obviously they can stay on land too.

But when the oxygen runs out, underwater is fairly quickly a deadly place for frogs – they can survive probably a maximum of 7 days without oxygen.

So the question is – what type of ponds are most likely to become de-oygenated.

And that’s what we’re working on now – so will keep you posted with results from the Big Pond Thaw and other information.

Jeremy