It has been a busy and exciting couple of months since I began the Natural Communities traineeship and I am greatly enjoying my placement with Froglife.
To celebrate National Science and Engineering Week, on 17th March Froglife hosted an event at Palacerigg Country Park in Cumbernauld. The day was titled ‘The Dragons’ Den’ and the aim was to introduce families to the magical underwater world of the newt!
The Froglife team based in Peterborough travelled up with all the colourful artwork and we spent an hour setting it all up. Families began by dressing up with a newt tail of their choice- palmate, smooth or great crested. They then entered the predator zone, where they had to find tokens showing a picture of a newt predator. This could be a fox, hedgehog or adder. Following the arrows to the habitat zone, children learnt about where a newt would hide from predators. Here they collected a token with a leaf pictures to show that newts hide under leaves. In the ‘Disco pond’ zone the challenge was to dance, waving arms and legs and tail, in order to impress the lady newt. If successful they collected a heart token. The final zone was the pond, where the aim was to find the correct food-water invertebrates are eaten by newts.
The Disco Pond Zone!
Having completed the game, children were given a sticker and a frog cake, then asked to answer some questions about what they had learnt, which was quite a lot! Families in Cumbernauld now know more about life in ponds-and newts in particular!
With the aim of increasing my knowledge of amphibians, at the end of March I travelled to Peterborough to take part in Great Crested Newt training with Froglife. At up to 17cm in length, the Great Crested Newt is the largest of the three newt species in Britain. The other two species are the Smooth newt and Palmate newt. The Great Crested Newt is also the rarest newt and has an impressive crest down its back and tail. We spent the afternoon learning about identification and ecology. That evening we went out to Hampton Nature Reserve in Peterborough to look for newts! Hampton Nature Reserve has up to four hundred ponds and is an amazing site for Great Crested Newts. Newt surveys are completed at night, in a variety of ways: torching, bottle traps and netting. A licence is needed to survey for Great Crested newts and we were lucky enough to be training with licensed Froglife staff. We set some bottle traps and used torches to look for newts in the water. It was my first encounter with Great Crested newts and I wasn’t disappointed- there were a large number of newts and we even watched males dancing to attract females. It was a brilliant opportunity to compare them with Smooth newts. Later on we looked for newts on land and found a beautiful female Great Crested Newt, with its bright yellow belly and black spots. It was a fantastic evening!
Female Great Crested Newt
I have spent time getting to know the local community at events in Cumbernauld. This has included the launch of Ravenswood Marsh Local Nature Reserve (LNR) and an Easter event at Palacerigg Country Park. At these events we did a quick pond dip and found aquatic invertebrates such as dragonfly larvae, great diving beetle larvae, caddisfly larvae and water boatmen, as well as some newt larvae that had overwintered at the bottom of the pond. These were put in tanks and shown to families who were fascinated by them and amazed at the variety of creatures that can be found in ponds.
There are many more Froglife events planned for the summer and I am looking forward to meeting more people in the local community and telling them about the fantastic wildlife that is to be found in ponds!