How 100 new ponds give Yorkshire’s great crested newts hope

AS shoots burst their way through the soil and the days get warmer and brighter, you may have started to see amphibians making their way to their breeding habitats – hearing the chorus of frogs or spotting them hopping across our roads, or potentially even catching the occasional glimpse of a newt.

The arrival of our spring wildlife is a relief, and a welcome change from what has felt like the ever-grey and dark of winter.

However, that isn’t to say that we have been hibernating in the same way as our wildlife.

For the first time in over 25 years and after extensive planning and groundworks, winter saw the restoration of the main pond at Yorkshire Wildlife Trust’s Askham Bog nature reserve to create the open water habitat which has steadily been lost from the reserve over the years.

Partnership projects with the Environment Agency led to new sustainable solutions to support farming, flood alleviation and wildlife activities at Carlton Marsh nature reserve in Selby; while in February, away from the prying eyes of the public in a hidden corner of Flamingo Land Resort near Pickering, Yorkshire Wildlife Trust hit a milestone – the 100th pond to be created or restored for great crested newts within the last five years.

Great crested newt. Photo by John Bridges

The process of restoring or creating a pond starts off with finding the right sites. Any groundworks must expand or strengthen existing great-crested newt populations based on historical records, finding a really good and firm clay base so a pond holds water naturally, and other factors such as finding places with reduced disturbance, away from invasive species, and not likely to be washed away by flood.

For restoring ponds, this needs to be done with the upmost sensitivity, at the correct time of year and with a considered and measured approach. We create detailed plans, bring in expert contractors to excavate the ponds, shape the ponds with shallow gradients and variable depths to maximise their value for wildlife – and then wait, for the rainwater to come naturally and for the ponds to recharge over winter ready to provide a home for newts and other wildlife in the next breeding season.

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Over the last five years, we have created or worked on over 16,000m2 of habitat – the equivalent of a single giant pond a third bigger again than Trafalgar Square! These new and improved ponds have helped to create a better-connected blue ‘corridor’ for amphibians thanks to funding from Natural England – and now, with the arrival of spring, we can really see these ponds come to life. Survey and monitoring is a key component of our work to measure success, and these too have seen change over time.

Monitoring historically involved long-established and licensable methods like bottle trapping, sweep netting, manually searching ponds at night with torches, and egg searches. Recent years have instead seen advancements in testing water to find environmental DNA (eDNA) – the animal’s skin cells, mucus, sperm, eggs and faeces left behind in ponds. Studies show that eDNA is 99.3per cent accurate in identifying the presence of great-crested newts, and this technique has become a key component of our protected species surveying work. It’s no mean feat; this year our team will be surveying an astonishing 77 ponds across the county, looking for the presence of great-crested newts.

Feeling inspired? Why not go exploring your nearest watery world and see what amphibian life you can spot – newts will be most visible at this time of year, although make sure you don’t disturb them!

Do you own land and want to help us create or restore ponds on it for wildlife? If you have space for a pond which is a minimum of 150m2, we’d love to hear from you. Email info@ywt.org.uk or visit www.yorkshirewt.org.uk/wildlife-pond-creation for more information.

John Thompson is the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust’s Wetland Creation Officer