A team of ARU student members are co-ordinating the Castor Palmate Newt Project – aiming to see how far beyond the known population at Castor Hanglands National Nature Reserve (NNR) this species’ distribution might reach.

Palmate newts are very rare in Cambridgeshire with only two records showing on the CPERC database from 1950-2012! One of the few sites this species is known at is Castor Hanglands NNR, managed by Natural England. In 2012 CPARG led an amphibian ID and survey session which inspired a group of us to go on and survey all the ponds here for palmates. Castor Hanglands once again earned its reputation as a top site, with all five widespread amphibians found and several ponds showing palmates, even on these late-season surveys.

Palmate newts are easily overlooked and can be mistaken for the more common smooth newt, but we know they’re present in the area and a skilled or trained eye can pick out the differences easily. This year we’d like to spread our net wider than the nature reserve and see whether the newts are surviving in the wider countryside.

The co-ordinators will contact members closer to the survey period with details on volunteer survey sessions. The project itself will follow two stages:

Stage 1:

• · Identifying from googlemaps (both aerial and map views) ponds in the surrounding area: http://goo.gl/maps/qbUkq
• · Identifying further ponds from OS maps (which CPARG can provide)
• · Identify landowners for these ponds
• · Contacting landowners to request permission to survey
• · Updating the CPARG Committee on progress or problems

Stage 2:

• · Organise an amphibian/palmate newt survey and training day for CPARG members
• · Undertake and/or co-ordinate sufficient and varied newt surveys at each of the sites to confidently confirm presence/absence of palmates
• · Collate and digitise all data from this project
• · Share the data with CPERC

To express interest in this project please email candparg@googlemail.com and cc paul.furnborough@sjc.oxon.org or call Paul on 07508020437 for an informal chat.

When: Sessions are held every Thursday 10AM – 3PM and two Saturdays/month 9.30AM – 3.30PM.

These include the following Saturdays: 18^th Jan; 1^st Feb; 15^th Feb; 1^st March; 15^th March; possibly 29^th March.

Where: We meet of Nature’s Way (J2 of the parkway – the ‘i' on this map: http://goo.gl/maps/qXdGp)

Booking essential: email paul.furnborough@froglife.org

Cambridgeshire plays host to the world’s biggest colony of Great Crested Newts at Hampton Nature Reserve (HNR)/Orton Brickpits (SSSI/SAC). It is managed by Froglife on behalf of the landowners O&H Hampton Ltd. Over winter Froglife volunteer teams are active every Thursday and two Saturdays per month managing the site. This mostly involves clearing scrub and brash and burning it off on a bonfire – which subsequently involves baked potatoes and fillings (feel free to bring bacon, marshmallows etc). This work is done to prevent scrub from dominating the site by maintaining a mosaic of open areas, young, dense regrowth and older scrubland features to maintain good conditions for newts, reptiles and other wildlife.

Please bring:

• · weather appropriate clothing – suitable for hot/cold/dry/wet accordingly
• · footwear with decent grip/ankle support (wellies or walking boots usually)
• · a packed lunch
• · plenty of fluids (I bring hot water but a lot of volunteers prefer their own home brew)
• · hand wash (the sort which doesn’t need water)
• · I’ll bring work gloves and tools as required, plus biscuits and hot drinks

Please note CPARG is promoting these herp conservation days but they are Froglife sessions, so you don’t need to be a CPARG member to attend.

Stanground Newt Ponds have been monitored for newts since their inception, and provide a long-term dataset not only for newt abundance but also for tunnel crossings. It also hosts new ‘newt-friendly’ kerbstones to usher newts around the drainage-hole trap. Having begun surveying on the site last year CPARG will be ‘adopting’ Stanground Newt Ponds as a favoured site for monitoring and management, working hand-in-hand with the Wildlife Trust to get the site into top condition for newt breeding and surveying.

Join us on Saturday 11^th January and Saturday 22^nd February to shake off the New Year’s cobwebs and return to Stanground newt ponds to continue to remove the scrub which is over-shadowing the ponds on this Wildlife Trust site. We’ll also clear some of the emergent vegetation to give us better viewing stations into the pond to make surveying easier. The session will start at 10AM and continue until we get tired and want to go home, probably around 3PM before it gets too dark.

We will have a fire to burn off all the brash so potatoes are on the menu, but please bring sausages, bacon or marshmallows if you’d like to cook more exotic bonfire foods too!

Tools and gloves will be provided, as will hot drinks and biscuits, but please bring weather appropriate clothes, cold drinks and a packed lunch. If you've got a camping chair please bring that for lunch-time too.

PCV have a map to the site here:

http://www.p-c-v.co.uk/html/body_newtpond.html

If you'd like to come to either session please email me to book on so that I can co-ordinate numbers with PCV: candparg@gmail.com.

The event is free, though you would need to either be a member or sign up on the day (membership is £5, and as we'll be into the quiet season for herps will last until March 2015).

Do you have a garden pond? Do you ever see frogs in your garden?

Lots of people would answer yes to at least one of these questions but unfortunately conservation organisations know very little about where frogs are found or how well they’re doing. But as urban dwellers as well as rural, frogs offer a great opportunity for the public to get face-to-face with wildlife and to contribute to its wellbeing. For two years the Freshwater Habitats Trust (formerly Pond Conservation) has been running a simple project to make this link. 

Members of the public who are lucky enough to spot frog spawn in their ponds are asked to fill in a simple online record form which then gets logged with others across the country to help answer these questions! This survey will also pick up on any toadspawn present…but it doesn’t look out for newts so we should still promote either Record Pool or CPERC to capture these records:

http://www.freshwaterhabitats.org.uk/projects/big-pond-dip/big-pond-spawn-count/

http://groups.arguk.org/CPARG/ or http://www.cperc.org.uk/submit-records/submit-single.php

The data from this survey will then be shared with county-based organisations to help fill in some of the gaps on their local frog maps.

This year Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Amphibian and Reptile Group (CPARG) will be promoting this project within our Cambridgeshire patch, contributing both to answering the big questions nationally (e.g. what sort of ponds do frogs like) and providing our partners at CPERC with up-to-date records of breeding frogs.

We’re looking for a team of confident volunteers to send out press releases to local media (online, papers, radio and TV) and to be available for interview to promote this project, CPARG’s other survey opportunities, and amphibian and reptile conservation generally.

If you might be interested in pitching this conservation message to local media please email us on candparg@googlemail.com and CC in paul.furnborough@sjc.oxon.org or call Paul for an informal chat on 07508020437.

This project would suit confident, friendly-sounding people either with or who would like to get some media experience.

Frogs could start breeding as early as February – or even sooner if we have a mild winter/early spring – so we’d like to have people signed up and ready to be interviewed by the end of January if possible. Good luck spreading the frog-count word!

Come along to the UK's big annual herp conference at Bristol Zoo on the weekend of 1st and 2nd February (and if you're a paid up CPARG member you get a big discount too - more than makes your money back!).

Check out the programme here: http://www.arc-trust.org/Resources/Arc%20Trust/Documents/HWM2014-Programme-version1.pdf

And general details here: http://www.arc-trust.org/about-us/What-we-do/annual-conferences/HWM/HWM2014/information.htm 

40 years of amphibian conservation in Britain

Serious amphibian conservation in Britain has a forty year history, initiated primarily by the British Herpetological Society after 1970. By then it was apparent that agricultural intensification starting during the second world war had precipitated declines in all our native species. Problems for British amphibians therefore predated 'global amphibian declines' and had relatively simple causes, notably habitat destruction and modification. Pesticides, acid rain, UV irradiation, climate change and disease have thus far proved relatively minor issues. Conservation of British amphibians started in the 1970s, initially just with status surveys but by the 1980s research into habitat requirements and proactive management was underway, particularly for the rare natterjack toad Bufo calamita. The relatively widespread great crested newt Triturus cristatus was given the same legal protection as B. calamita in 1981 mainly due to declines elsewhere in Europe, a problematic situation for conservationists due to the large number of sites in the UK which regularly comes under threat from development. Additional difficulties identified in the 1990s included serious impacts of road mortality on common toads Bufo bufo. A previously unrecognised rare native, the ‘northern clade’ of pool frogs Pelophylax lessonae became extinct in the early 1990s but was reintroduced in the 2000s. New (post 1989) organisations, especially Amphibian & Reptile Conservation and the county Amphibian and Reptile Groups, have benefitted UK herpetofauna substantially. Nevertheless, conservation efforts have stabilised but not increased the UK B. calamita population while some of the widespread species are probably still declining albeit at a much slower rate (possibly excepting B. bufo) than in the post-war period. Effective methods for amphibian conservation are now available and the main outstanding question is whether there will be sufficient resources to make greater gains in future. The talk will be about an hour long but we may overrun slightly. Afterwards there will be a chance to ask Trevor Beebeeany questions you may have.

Venue: Jordan Room, Romsey Mill, Hemingford Road (just off of Mill Road), Cambridge, CB1 3BZ.

Parking: Nearest car park is Queen Anne's Terrace Car Park, Cambridge, CB1 1ND. The car park is about a 15-20 minute walk away from our venue. Night time parking costs are quite cheap. Some of the near-by roads may also have some spaces for people to park. 

Time: 7:30pm start, arrive a little earlier to find a seat and grab some refreshments.

Price: Free to CPARG members.

Stanground Newt Ponds have been monitored for newts since their inception, and provide a long-term dataset not only for newt abundance but also for tunnel crossings. It also hosts new ‘newt-friendly’ kerbstones to usher newts around the drainage-hole trap. Having begun surveying on the site last year CPARG will be ‘adopting’ Stanground Newt Ponds as a favoured site for monitoring and management, working hand-in-hand with the Wildlife Trust to get the site into top condition for newt breeding and surveying.

Join us on Saturday 22^nd February to shake off the New Year’s cobwebs and return to Stanground newt ponds to continue to remove the scrub which is over-shadowing the ponds on this Wildlife Trust site. We’ll also clear some of the emergent vegetation to give us better viewing stations into the pond to make surveying easier. The session will start at 10AM and continue until we get tired and want to go home, probably around 3PM before it gets too dark.

We will have a fire to burn off all the brash so potatoes are on the menu, but please bring sausages, bacon or marshmallows if you’d like to cook more exotic bonfire foods too!

Tools and gloves will be provided, as will hot drinks and biscuits, but please bring weather appropriate clothes, cold drinks and a packed lunch. If you've got a camping chair please bring that for lunch-time too.

PCV have a map to the site here:

http://www.p-c-v.co.uk/html/body_newtpond.html

If you'd like to come please email me to book on candparg@gmail.com.

The event is free, though you would need to either be a member or sign up on the day (membership is £5, and as we'll be into the quiet season for herps will last until March 2015).

CPARG will be holding it's annual AGM at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge on the 19th March 2014. The AGM will run from 7pm until around 7:30pm. From here on a talk will be given until about 8:30pm with time for questions afterwards.

The AGM and talk will be held in the Lord Ashcroft Building in room 221. The room will be signposted so those who aren't familiar with the layout of the building can still find their way. 

The great crested newt training day will be run by Froglife in Peterborough on Saturday 29^th March. The session will run from 10AM until 10PM with classroom theory in the morning/afternoon and survey practical in the evening. The evening session often over-runs because participants get quite enthusiastic about spotting newts 

The classroom is located at Froglife HQ, 1 Loxley, Werrington, Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, PE4 5BW.

The fieldwork will be based on the Hampton Nature Reserve, Peterborough – home to the world’s largest colony of great crested newts.

The day long course content covers:

• ID
• Ecology
• Habitat Creation and Restoration
• HSI
• Legal Protection
• Survey Techniques and Translocation Methods (with a focus on surveys)
• Biosecurity
• Bottle trap and egg-strip making (optional)

The surveys will include such methods as: hand searching, egg searching, netting, torching and bottle trapping.

The course is designed to be suitable for people of all skill levels, from never having even seen a newt right through to having spent a decade working with them.

The course price is £15 for non-consultant CPARG members (membership is £5) to support local survey efforts.

To enquire further or to book a place please email paul.furnborough@froglife.org with GCN Training 2014 in the subject line and specify whether you are a consultant, a (prospective) CPARG member or an active Froglife volunteer.

The workshop will cover the identification, life histories and habitats of our native amphibians and surveying for the protected great crested newt including health and safety and legislation. Participants will gain experience in assessing habitats and surveying for great crested newts on this former brickyard.

The workshop will run from 3:15pm to around 9:15pm at Ramsey Heights, Cambridgeshire. 

For more information you can click here.