The Garden Pond Blog

Another exiting freshwater find today: this time it’s new pond sites for the extremely endangered Tadpole Shrimp (Triops cancriformis).

Until today’s reports this animal was known only in the New Forest in two, or perhaps three, ponds, and along the Solway coast in one single pond.

It’s survival in the UK is remarkable – not least because one of its sites is within 2 m (yes 2 m) of a road.

I’ve featured the Solway site before, which was originally discovered by the staff of the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust.

Now there are reports of two new sites, also on the Solway – covered by the BBC here, the Guardian here and the Mail.

I thought readers of the blog might be interested to see the messages to RSPB members, Wildlife Trust members and members of the British Association for Shooting and Conservation from the Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman to get involved in designing the new White Paper on the Natural Environment (a White Paper is the traditional precursor to a new Act of Parliament).

It will probably be a good idea for all of us to get behind Caroline Spelman as she argues the case for wildlife and the environment over the next few months.

And for members of the the Wildlife Trusts…..

And for the members of the British Association for Shooting and Conservation (known as BASC).

Is there a connection to garden ponds?

Well, of course. Making top quality garden ponds is one way of putting back into the landscape something that has become extremely rare in much of England: clean, unpolluted, water – a very real way of making your own personal contribution to increasing the extent of good quality wildlife habitats.

And out in the countryside, making ponds looks like a remarkably good way of protecting freshwater biodiversity more generally, as important as trying to clean up rivers, create new wetlands and improve degraded lakes.

The Old Pond is not looking like a thing of beauty, but the wildlife is doing fine at the moment in just 5 cm of water

With the drought continuing, at least here in Abingdon, my Old Pond now has a maximum water depth of 5 cm in three separate basins.

I’m now starting on the third of my five rainwater butts keeping a bit of water in the pond.

It has to be said, it’s not looking great! And with all that duckweed……ugh.

So it was good timing that last week we did a detailed survey of the pond as part of student Emeline Favreau’s project with us, following up on some of the Abingdon ponds we surveyed in detail last year.

It’s been clear all along that my Old Pond is one of the better ponds in the Abingdon gardens as we might expect given its combination of clean water, shallow depths and pretty natural edges. But has the low water made any difference?

Well…the answer seems to be – not much.

We found all four species of dragonflies and damselflies which are breeding in the pond: so that’s plenty of Large Red damselflies, Broad-bodied Chasers (we saw c.20 larvae), a few Common Darter larvae and a couple of Brown Hawker larvae.

There are still mayflies, and we found caddis – though we haven’t identified the species yet – and it has the be remembered that the summer is not such a good time for finding caddis as many emerge quite early in the spring and may not have hatched a new generation yet.

There were Spotted Backswimmers (Notonecta maculata) and what will probably all turn out to be Common Pondskaters (Gerris lacustris), much the same as last year.

Last year we found 11 species of water beetles, and we’ve got at least 10 this time.

There are still plenty of Smooth Ram’s-horn snails – one of the ponds specialities – though we may not have any Whirlpool Ram’s-horns this time.

There is one more wetland plant species than last year with the arrival of Marsh Willowherb.

And there have been young frogs metamorphosing through the dry period.

We found one creature this year which wasn’t there last year, and that was a Horse Leech, which had colonised the pond in the intervening period.

All in all, the low water has made very little difference to the pond so far – with only two lesser water boatmen missing, perhaps because they really do need some open water over bare substrates.

It’ll be interesting to see how things go on over the rest of the summer and autumn.

An adult midge sucking up...er...blood

I noticed today that the Independent is reporting that tall fat people are more likely to be bitten by midges.

Midges – technically they belong to the family Ceratopogonidae (ke-ra-to-pogon-idee) – are the tiny 2 mm long blighters that drive you mad in Scotland.

They live in damp boggy soils and also in ponds, lakes and rivers.

The larvae are very distinctive – about a centimetre long, very thin, with a distinctive way of swimming. There are usually a few in my ponds in the garden.

A ceratopogonid midge larva - you can see these in lots of garden ponds. The tiny head is on the left.

But the adult midges are never, in my experience, a problem in the garden when it comes to biting – there just aren’t enough of them, although I guess if your garden is in the middle of the Scottish Highlands it might be a different story.

Ironically at home in Abingdon we’re more likely to be bitten in the garden by blackflies which have flown at least 250 m from the nearest stream to get to our house. Blackflies in this context are not like greenfly but members of the family Simuliidae, a family of biting flies which have larvae that depend entirely on running water. So they’ve made a fair old trek for a little fly to get to our garden. Why do they do it!

I have a bit of a hate-hate relationship with blackflies, not because there’a anything specially bad about them (in this country they’re only after a bit of blood after all, though in some part of the tropics they are a much more serious health issue)…….but because I spent 4 years doing a PhD on them!

And this was definitely the most psychologically gruelling period of my life!

I was interested to read the article by Nicholas Milton in the Guardian here about how the wildlife organisations who are part of the umbrella group Wildlife and Countryside Link, are, by implication, doing the governments dirty work by looking for ‘efficiencies’ (aka cuts) in the environment budget.

I declare an interest here: I’m a Trustee of  Wildlife and Countryside Link, Pond Conservation is a Link member and, as part of the process Nicholas complains about, I’ve made suggestions about some things that could be done differently, and better.

Actually our ideas are one of 9 suggestions that the wildlife movement has put together to do things differently or better. I’ll reproduce the watery suggestion in full here which is under the heading of Focus on upstream solutions (warning – this stuff is often in impenetrable language!).

So our proposal is:

“Increase the focus of water management policies and agri-environment spend on upper catchments and smaller waters (headwater streams, ponds, ditches) to deliver freshwater ecosystem services, biodiversity and statutory gains. Inclusion of smaller waters offers the potential to re-establish clean, unpolluted water as a common feature across many landscapes.”

Perhaps I shouldn’t say it, but it’s cheap too. For the cost of one desalination plant in London we could make 100,000 clean water, unpolluted, ponds – roughly what England has lost over the last 50 years.

If you saw the Sunday Telegraph article on ponds this weekend you might be wondering whether Large Red Damseflies are rare, or at least creatures that are pretty uncommon (like the other animals shown: Water Voles, Natterjack Toads and Great Crested Newts).

Well, the answer is: of course not. Large Reds are found in about 1 in 5 of all ponds in the countryside, and in lots of garden ponds too – in fact in Abingdon we had them in half the ponds.

But there is a more interesting story here too. In high quality unpolluted ponds we find Large Red Damseflies in two-thirds of all ponds – so they should be almost everywhere. The fact that they aren’t is probably something to do with the terrible state of most ponds.

And in case you’re wondering, like the people who came up to me at the Game Fair at the weekend brandishing copies of the Sunday Telegraph and rather irately saying ‘I thought this was your project!, the article is indeed referring to the Million Ponds Project. Though you might not realise this from the press release issued by the Environment Agency!

So just to remind them: here’s a gardener and some other bloke in a suit launching the project!

Today I was at the Game Fair – along with my colleague Angela Julian who runs our supporters scheme.

We met a variety of interesting people – I’m particularly hoping to speak again to one farmer who had twenty ponds in varying stages of succession and was keen not to dredge them all out at once – which is absolutely the right approach. And we signed up some new members too.

When you talk to the farming community – who are a big part of the audience at the Game Fair – it’s often hard to get away from the fact that pollution is the major pond management problem facing many people – and it’s often not easy to find a solution to this problem.

So during the day we’ve discussed the near inevitability of springs being polluted these days (it’s very sad because most people assume that springs are pure – perhaps they’re lulled into a false sense of security by bottled spring water), what to do about a pond covered by Water Fern (try to get rid of the massive amounts of polluting phosphorus which is usually the cause), and how to deal with blanketweed (very tricky – telling people that you need unpolluted water isn’t much comfort as it’s quite often impossible to clean up the water source in existing ponds).

Which is why it’s always good to catch people at the pond creation stage - because very often, when you’re starting from scratch, you can find a clean water supply to get the pond off to a good start.

Which also makes today’s publicity about the Million Ponds Project particularly appropriate.

Thanks to our colleagues in the Environment Agency (especially Alistair Driver) for getting some excellent coverage on the BBC website today.

You can see the article here.

The Environment Agency is one of the main partners in the Million Ponds Project, and has made a brilliant contribution to the project creating top quality ponds all around the country.

As readers of the blog will know Million Ponds is all about putting back clean, unpolluted, water into the countryside – something which is now rare in large parts of the landscape.

There’s also coverage in the Sunday Telegraph.

And we also get a kind comment from Mark Avery, Conservation Director of the RSPB (but Mark’s also recently become a Pond Conservation trustee, so he’s perhaps a little biased!).

For Radio 4 aficionados you can hear the seductive tones of Charlotte Green ever so nicely enunciating the names of Tadpole Shrimp, One-lined Diving Beetle and Threaded Toothwort at the crackingly early time of 5.30 am. Go to the link and slide forward to minute 4.00.

It’s a while since we had a good pond video here.

Although this isn’t quite up to the standard of the Axe Man, the activities shown here do deserve some credit for what seems to be a truly original use of an excavator.

A female Common Emerald showing the typical resting position, wings spread, which gives them their alternative name of spreadwings

Looking at Katie’s blog (see comments) I’m impressed, and definitely envious, that she has seen Emerald Damselflies in her garden.

Emerald damselflies in general are specialists of ponds that dry out or have big drawdown zones. Until recently there were only two species in Britain the Common Emerald Damselfly (Lestes sponsa) and the Scarce Emerald Damselfly (Lestes dryas) which is much less common and, in the UK, restricted to East Anglia.  But over the last few years two other species have joined the British fauna: the Southern Emerald Damselfly and the Green Emerald Damselfly.

Emeralds are not, as far as I know, so often seen in gardens, though they are fairly common animals – we found them in about 1 in 6 high quality ponds in the National Pond Survey. We’ve so far found none in the Abingdon garden ponds – perhaps not surprising seeing that only two of the ponds we’ve looked at have a significant drawdown.  And looking at the location of Katie’s pond – it seems to be pretty much out in the country.

Common Emeralds were, however, abundant around the New and Old Pill on Otmoor when I visited last week. These two ponds are much more like the typical habitat: drying out in drought years with big drawdown zones. And of course absolutely top notch sites as well.

Although the Common Emerald is relatively common, it doesn’t like damaged habitats so much: in degraded ponds we’ve only found it in about 1 in 20 sites.