Great Crested Newt Training

This weekend I am attending a course at FSC Preston Montford called “Working towards a GCN licence” … and the title pretty much sums it up. Whilst I’ve been gaining experience by working with various people for the last couple of years, it is good to get formal training. There is also a short test at the end of the course, and upon successful completion I'll get an attendance certificate that equates to one of the two references needed to gain my own licence. At the moment, I am either working with other qualified/licensed people, or am limited to the sites and activities for the PondNet project. By doing this course, I will be able to do bottle-trapping on my sites, but will still be limited to my official PondNet sites to be under the remit of that licence.

The course started at 4:30pm and we had a session before dinner to cover off some of the laws and regulations. We also got stuck in straight away making bottle traps, with the handy hint to use a soldering iron to make the holes that the bamboo cane goes through, and then the plastic does not split.  

After dinner, we were straight out in the field and setting out our bottle traps.  Working in groups of four, we set out ten bottles per group around a medium-large pond on site.  We will be going back early in the morning to empty them.  We also had a look at some options for setting traps in more difficult circumstances, such as when ponds are lined.  This involved putting two rubber bands around the bottle, and then putting the cane through the rubber bands so that it was held horizontally against rather than going through the bottle. The cane can then be fixed into the bank of the pond rather than the base.

We finished off with a classroom session which was a slide-show of newt identification.  This involved lots of photographs and it was useful to see the finer details of the species, which can look similar in some circumstances.

I’m not sure I will learn lots of new things on this course, but it will be really good to embed my existing knowledge, share best practices and become more proficient in my skills.