Heading out to survey wildlife in the dead of night… It’s always a mixture of feelings: will it be worth it? Have I got everything I need? I must admit I still get tingles of excitement! Join me as I share my latest late night endeavours to find out how our habitat work at Brankley Pastures is fairing for one of our protected amphibian species.

You might be wondering why we have to survey for newts in the dark. Well it’s simple, this is when they’re most active, when they’re likely to be seen and when we’re most likely to attract them to our traps.

You might also be wondering why we need to survey for newts at all? So first off I’ll share a little bit of info on newts, their breeding activities and different species, before covering why we need to know if they’re using our newly created ponds.

A trio of beauties

There are three species of native newt in the UK. The great crested newt which is our largest newt and can grow up to 17cm in length, they have a dark warty skin, a bright orange belly and during breeding season the males will develop a jagged crest along their back and tail white a white stripe down the tail. We also have smooth newts and palmate newts which both grow up to 10cm and are brown with yellow/orange bellies. They can be very difficult to tell apart, however during breeding season the males of both species develop a crest but palmate males also develop distinctive black webbing on their back feet and a fine filament at the tip of the tail.

As amphibians they have aquatic and terrestrial (land) life stages. In the spring terrestrial adults will move back to ponds to breed and lay eggs, shortly after this they leave the ponds to live on land again until the following spring. When moving to a pond in the spring male newts grow a crest along their back and tail, which they will reabsorb when they are preparing to move back to land living. Eggs are laid individually on leaves which females fold in half with their back feet, wrapping the egg to protect it. Eggs hatch into efts with feathery gills and eat a range of invertebrates in the pond until they reach a certain size and lose their gills to emerge from the pond as a juvenile newt at the end of summer. These newts won’t return to a pond until they are a fully grown adult and have reached breeding condition. 

Great crested newts

These newts are protected under Schedule 5 of the Wildllife and Countryside Act and are designated as a European Protected Species (EPS), making it illegal to kill, injure, capture or disturb, possess, sell or trade them; or to damage or destroy their aquatic and terrestrial habitats. While they are more common in the UK than on the continent (the UK is home to approximately 70 per cent of all great crested newts), they are the fastest declining amphibian in the UK and recently their numbers have plummeted significantly.

To reliably determine if newts are present within an area, the easiest and most reliable way is to complete a population monitoring survey. We complete it in spring and focus on surveying adult newts, who have returned to ponds to breed, which means we can establish the approximate population. This natural meeting point for newts affords us the chance to survey a significant proportion of the population just by looking at the ponds. As it is illegal to capture and disturb great crested newts, a licence from Natural England is required to undertake a survey (which I hold).

Three ways to survey

We typically use three techniques to detect newts: 

1. bottle-trapping - setting traps in ponds during the evening which are removed during the early hours when any newts are counted and released.
2. torchlight survey - visiting a pond when it’s dark and shining a high-powered torch into the pond to search for newts.
3. egg searching - looking for characteristically folded leaves in the pond where a newt has laid an egg and folded the leaf over to protect it.

As adult newts are only present in ponds during the spring to breed, we have to survey between mid-March and mid-June, with half of the survey visits occurring between mid-April and mid-May as this is generally the time when newts are at their highest abundance in the ponds. To determine presence or absence of newts within a pond four visits are required, while six visits are needed to determine the population size class. 

Why survey?

As I mentioned great crested newt numbers have been on a downward spiral. This is why surveying them is so important. We obviously want to know if the habitat work we do is helping them, and where they’re holding on in greater numbers. While the vast majority of great crested newt surveys are carried out by ecological consultants largely as a requirement of planning applications, conservation organisations such as SWT do also undertake surveys to inform our management of sites.

That’s why this spring we headed to Brankley Pastures Nature Reserve in the dead of night. We surveyed five ponds which where newly created in late 2022, alongside four pre-existing ponds to see whether newts were present this spring. As these five new ponds have only recently been created and are being left to colonise naturally, they are still establishing and there is hardly any vegetation in them for newts to lay eggs on. Therefore, we wouldn't expect to find large numbers of newts if any at all during the first year. So we got a (nice) surprise to find a great crested newt in one of the new ponds and a smooth newt in another, as well as finding both species of newts in the pre-existing pond on the reserve. 

As an aside we also recorded a species of great diving beetle (Dytiscus circumflexus) in two of the new ponds. A species which has not previously been recorded in Staffordshire. This species used to have a more southerly distribution and although it is not commonly encountered here, it is expanding it's range northward.