This spring and summer BRERC has been carrying out surveys for Great Crested Newts, supported by the Environment Agency. The Great Crested Newt is an amphibian with considerable legal protection in the UK, and our surveyors at BRERC all had to apply for special licenses from English Nature to carry out surveys.
One of the reasons they are so heavily protected is their perceived decline. I have heard many stories from people who were kids about 40 years ago of the great numbers of this species, and how as children they used to have competitions to see how many they could catch!
Despite all these historic anecdotes, the BRERC database holds just 210 Great Crested Newt records for the whole region. There is little doubt that the species has declined, but how much of that is a lack of recording effort? In other words, if we were to start looking closer, would we find that there were lots of Great Crested Newts in every pond we came across?
BRERC has been carrying out both torchlight and daylight surveys to try and answer this question. Torchlight surveys are generally the best way to see the adult newt, as they tend to be more active at night, but it's a lot more convenient for our surveyors to work during the day! In daylight egg searches can still be performed and ponds can be dipped to try and capture any of the younger newts, from which a positive identification can still be made.
In August I helped BRERC surveyors on a daytime survey where we visited three very different sites in one day. The first was Grove Park, near the centre of Weston-super-Mare. There was some indication of historic Great Crested Newt records at this site, but at first glance the ornamental ponds didn't look capable of supporting any life, let alone Great Crested Newts! After some rigorous dipping, we did manage to capture an inch-long immature smooth newt, but perhaps unsurprisingly, no Great Crested Newts were found.
We then moved on to Winscombe, and to a private nature pond managed by landowners very keen on conservation. They were more than happy for us to look at their pond, which was in actual fact more like a lake! Our nets were woefully inadequate to try and establish the presence of Great Crested Newts – they could have been hiding anywhere! But the presence of many dragonflies and other pond dwelling creatures we fished up seemed to suggest that the site could be suitable – a possible target for a torchlight survey in the future.
A visit to an old mill pond was next on the agenda. The owner was extremely sceptical of our chances of finding anything alive, since the pond had suffered a pollution incident several years before. However, at our first dip we recovered an immature smooth newt, so all was not lost! But we didn't find anything else and the mill pond had steep sides which were not easy for newts to negotiate, so it looked as if this site was probably a negative.
We couldn't actually get to our last site as it was in a private field. Getting permission for pond surveys is always tricky because the landowners can be difficult to trace. It's time consuming to try and gain permission beforehand, but can be equally frustrating to try and get permission by knocking on doors on the day of the survey. In this the case a homeowner opposite gave us a record of a possible sighting when he told us that his gardener had accidentally decapitated a Great Crested Newt with a strimmer a couple of weeks beforehand – not a nice way to go, and the gardener was apparently distraught!
Despite our lack of success on the day, we shouldn't despair of finding these elusive creatures, and there is still much work to be done. I know of further sites where I have seen or been told of the presence of Great Crested Newts, and next summer some more detective work may be in order!