Start of Pond Surveying Season

In previous years I have monitored a few ponds in my local nature reserves. This year, I have been more ambitious and have extended both the number of sites to be covered and the scope of the surveys. As I am also wanting to gain experience and work towards my Great Crested Newt licence, I put a request out via my local ARG group to see if anyone would like to help me and have had an overwhelming response, with more than fifteen people coming forward. This means that I will always have someone with me when I go out surveying, which not only makes it more enjoyable but is also safer and I can do more night visits with confidence. The people helping me have a range of experience - some already hold a licence and others are wanting to learn more, so it's great that we can all support each other.

I have arranged to survey all three sites on alternate weeks.  This week was the first visit and was carried out during the day. The aim was to reconnoitre the site and gather environmental data, as well as doing a visual search of the ponds for signs of amphibians but mostly for frog spawn.

The environmental data provides an impression of the health of the pond, but also enables a Habitat Suitability Index to be generated. This provides a score that evaluates the suitability of the pond for Great Crested Newts based on ten factors. Being able to assess this is a requirement of the CIEEM competencies and the GCN licence, so I am trying to get as much experience as possible.  I have also been compiling the results into a summary document for each site to gain experience of producing ecological reports.

Our first visit was on Saturday to Letchmire Pastures. It took slightly longer than I envisaged to carry out the survey, but once I re-familiarise myself with the paperwork I am sure this will become easier. We found some frog spawn and stickleback in one pond, but not much else of interest.

On Tuesday, we surveyed Ledston Luck nature reserve. This was a much more interesting visit. Whilst looking for frog spawn, I stumbled across a feeding pile and latrine and confirmed water vole presence on the site. This was really exciting and totally unexpected and it made my day. We also saw signs of other mammals including fox, deer and field vole. There are two really nice ponds on site, two that are not so good as they are in very wooded areas, and some scrapes on the plateau that are unlikely to support amphibians.

On Thursday, we visited the largest site at Rothwell Country Park. I am more familiar with this site, as it's the one I have surveyed the most of the years. Although we did find frog spawn, there were no signs of newts although the water was very turbid in most of the ponds. I am not sure what is causing this as there has not been much rain recently.

On all of the surveys, we did a brief invertebrate sweep to assess the water quality. I do enjoy this part of the survey, and I would like to be able to identify more of the species, though I am getting more familiar with them already.

The most time-consuming part of the week has been compiling the results. I am transposing these onto my own spreadsheet, but they also have to be keyed onto the PondNet website.  I ultimately want to produce a report for each site, but am still experimenting with this and am researching what I should include and how this is best presented.

On Friday, I carried out an extra survey and went to Skelton Grange Environment Centre. As these are not part of my PondNet project, I carried out a shorter survey and just compiled the HSI scores for the ponds. This has given me good practice at writing up the results and thinking about their implications.