Welcome to Derbyshire Amphibian and Reptile Group we cover the whole of Derbyshire including part of the Peak District National Park.
Our group aims to promote the study and conservation of the amphibians and reptiles of Derbyshire and their habitats. We achieve this by:
We hope our website will help you to find the information you are looking for, but if you still have a query, please contact us and we will do our best to help.
Derbyshire ARG always welcome new members to the group, please email us on derbyshirearg@gmail.com to join. There is a membership subscription of £5 per year, though that is reviewed at every AGM..
We are very grateful for any records of amphibians and reptiles in your local area that you can pass to us as it helps in mapping the distribution of species and protecting their known habitats. Either contact us directly or use the Record a sighting tab on this website.
The group is run by a committee which is elected at the AGM each year. For 2021 - 2022 the committee elected at the AGM on 10th November 2021 are:
Chair - Kelvin Lawrence, Vice Chair - Christian Murray-Leslie, Secretary - Chris Monk, Treasurer - Jayne Thompson
Committee members - Garry Dorrell, Richard Fenn Griffin, James Longley, Sheila Stubbs, Trevor Taylor and Ben Wyke
Kelvin Lawrence is also the Derbyshire Toad Crossings Co-ordinator for the Group & for Froglife and Richard Fenn Griffen moderates our Facebook page
See a previous newsletters here
January_2021_DARG_newsletter_31.pdf
August_2020_DerbyshireARG_newsletter.pdf
February_2020_DARG_Events_newsletter.pdf
DARG_April_2019_newsletter.pdf
DARG_January_2019_newsletter.pdf
Derbyshire ARG data policy
DARG_data_protection_policy_November_2018.pdf
The Freshwater Habitats Trust have sent out the results from the analysis for great crested newt eDNA of their Pond Net samples earlier this year. Members of Derbyshire ARG had a field trip to a pond near Pilsbury in the Peak National Park which was the square allocated to us in the PondNet survey. A previous visit by FHT in 2015 was apparently negative for GCN eDNA but our sample from May 2016 has come back as positive for the presence of great crested newts.
\rTwo other ponds near Hartington where we went on to take further eDNA samples for analysis by ADAS (and paid for by Derbyshire ARG) had already come back as positive for great crested newts. The farmer who owns one of the ponds would like us to survey all his 4 ponds in 2017 so it is planned to organise surveys there and at another farm near Pikehall next spring.
A working party of Derbyshire ARG members undertook conservation work at the end of October 2016 to clear vegetation on a dewpond on the edge of a hay meadow near Hartington in the Peak District. Previous recording which started in 1988 and was more regular in the past decade had shown that the pond supported great crested and smooth newts, common frog and common toad. However after years of virtually no change, in the past two years nearly all the dewpond was swamped by Glyceria that formed a thick floating mat leaving just a small open water area in the middle.
The Glyceria mat was so interconnected that it had to be cut up into segments so that it could be pulled out using pond rakes. About two thirds of the pond was cleared leaving sufficient vegetation on one side where there was a greater variety of emergent aqautic plants. Hopefully the small clump of Potamogeton natans that was still surviving in the open water area when we arrived will spread back into the cleared areas.
The type of moorland management in the Dark Peak is of concern to herpetologists as intensive management with regular burning is extremely detrimental to reptiles. There has been considerable concern by naturalists over the persecution of birds of prey which has prevented most species breeding in the National Park. Over a century of keepering has resulted in the destruction of "vermin" on the grouse moors and as a result of this and the burning there are no known adder populations on the keepered moors. If highly protected birds like hen harriers and peregrines are illegally killed by some people then they would have no qualms in dispatching any adders they come across.
Due to incidents the National Trust has announced that the grouse shooting lease of two of its large tenanted estates on the Dark Peak will be terminated in a year's time as they do not consider the tenant can produce the outcomes desired in the NTs Moorland Vision.
A campaign has been set up to welcome the decision by the National Trust and to call on the Trust not to lease the land to another shooting tenant. Instead, the NT should take the opportunity to work with other partners to establish a wilder landscape, free of intensive grouse-management, where wildlife can recover and thrive and not be subject to illegal persecution. Derbyshire ARG is one of the 12 local environmental groups who have formed a coalition to sponsor the campaign and petition.
Find out "moor" at http://nomoorshooting.blogspot.co.uk
or sign the petition online at https://you.38degrees.org.uk/p/nomoorshooting
The first results are back from the eDNA water samples taken by the group on the GCN training course day and on the field trip in May.
The water sample from the pond at Hilton Gravel Pits SSSI nature reserve came back negative for great crested newts, so they appear to be avoiding this pond which probably has more fish than the one we saw at the time of sampling.
The village mere pond sampled on the field trip and the restored field dewpond both near Hartington came back as positive for great crested newts.
The results from the pond sampled as part of Freshwater Habitats Trust PondNet project will be know later in the year.
As in all years since 2005, excepting the Covid lockdown in 2020, we will again be carrying out pond surveys across the White Peak area of the Peak District National Park this spring. Mostly monitoring the amphibian colonisation of dewponds restored by the National Park Authority's, National Trust, Plantlife and others. Mostly we will be carrying out torchlight surveys for newts but there will also be some bottle trapping and GCN eDNA water sampling.
Members/volunteers who would like to assist please contact us at derbyshirearg@gmail.com
We will be running a servies of reptile surveys at our reptile monitoring sites in and around the Peak District in the north eastern part of the County.
Depending on weather conditions we plan to run a survey trip every other week during the period at the Stanage & North Lees Estate in the Dark Peak, Linacre Reservoirs near Chesterfield and Hassop Common in the White Peak
Contact us if you want to join in
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A bit early but dates have already been fixed by Derbyshire County Council for next year's festival at it's usual venue in Elvaston Castle Country Park, near Derby. We will probably have a stand there as we have done most years since 2011.
For Toad Crossings and to contact our Derbyshire Toad Crossings Co-ordinator please email derbyshirearg.toads@gmail.com
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