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Welcome Barbara! This is a great group of people and I’m sure everyone will benefit from you being a member. 🙂
Regarding your cattle, might be worth sending your details also to Montgomeryshire Wildlife Trust (for which I am also Conservation Officer); we often struggle to get cattle grazing on our sites, so it could well be a beneficial relationship. Suggest emailing Head of Living Landscapes, Ceri Jones, in the first instance, and telling her I sent you! ceri@montwt.co.uk
Hope to see you at an event soon.
Tammy
Glad they came back, Andy. Think you might find this interesting, copied from a post I put on the MWT Facebook last year:
Used to have frogs in your pond, but now they have gone? Perhaps they’ve been replaced by newts? There is a good reason for this and it’s nothing you’ve done wrong; rather it is all down to the breeding ecology of the frog. With thanks to Peter Hill, Connecting the Dragons Project Officer at Amphibian & Reptile Conservation, here is the explanation:
“A topic that I notice is often brought up here among the members is that of frogs being present in garden ponds during the first few years of the pond’s creation, but newts displacing frogs over time. This is a typical scenario, and one that I have significant experience of over the years in different situations, so I thought people may find an explanation useful. To start with, the common frog has a very different ecology to that of newts. Overall, frogs prefer to spawn in shallow, temporary water bodies. Often, ditches, and flooded grasslands, flooded pasture and even flooded golf courses are utilised. So why do frogs spawn in a ditch or puddle that may potentially dry out rather than an established pond? Well, shallow water bodies are ideal as the shallow water warms quickly, boosting the growth of algae and the tadpoles themselves. By the time the tadpoles are hatching, in a shallow sun-lit pool or ditch, the spawn will have a coating of algae present on which to graze. By the time the tadpoles have eaten the algae-covered spawn mat, they are the free swimming animals that we are all familiar with and can feed in the more widely understood manner. As well as being shallow, temporary water bodies that dry out at the end of the summer have significantly less predators present (aquatic inverts and their larvae, newts etc) so herein lies the answer. The highly mobile frog is usually the first amphibian to arrive at and utilise a new garden pond, as it will look and feel a lot like a temporary water body. Newts generally take a while longer to arrive, and slowly but surely increase in number. As garden ponds develop, they become more suited to newts (a dense under-water jungle loaded with potential newt prey of all forms) and as most garden ponds are comparatively small, the newt population can eventually reach an incredibly high density. As a child, I would regularly visit a model village that had numerous small ponds throughout its design, serving as model rivers, boating lakes and harbours. The population of smooth newts within the network of small water bodies at the model village was of epic proportions. One casual sweep of the net would result in 10-15 newts squirming in the net. Contrary to popular belief, frogs are not entirely faithful to natal ponds and can make the choice to abandon garden ponds at which newts have reached high density. They simply go elsewhere. If you find yourself in a situation of a pond full of newts and hardly any frogs, consider creating a shallow sun-lit extra “puddle” or two elsewhere. Manage the vegetation in a pretty severe manner at the end of each active season, removing most of the vegetation which can be destined for the compost heap. You could even drain it completely at the end of the summer, or let the water evaporate, and then let the rains fill it again in the spring. This will keep your frog “puddle” in a condition that is highly suited to frogs, and less so for newts, and the newts can continue to proliferate in the main vegetated and established pond. You will of course experience newts raiding the frog puddle if it becomes more newt-friendly, but ongoing management, a very different regime for the two very different water bodies, can keep the amphibian assemblage in your garden more diverse that way. I hope this helps, and good luck.”
Hi Sue,
I only have personal experience from my overgrown lawns, but have been astounded at how quickly they have turned from that to nice meadows. Essentially, I have just been managing them as such, with one small application of seed hand harvested from a very nice local meadow. This year, one has to be at least 50% Yellow Rattle, with lots of Common Vetch and some knapweed. The other is more variable, with still some rank grasses in places, but increasing amounts of Yellow Rattle and other nice wildflowers.
I am lucky that we are next to grassland with anthills, so the ants have already started moving in too. This has been quite interesting as I was always told that only very old meadows had anthills in them, but the size of some of the ones in my lawn is already quite amazing and this is the sixth season of managing it this way.
As well as my two ‘meadows’, I have an area of grass where we cut some of it, but mow round the nice flowers through the growing season, leaving stunning patches of buttercups, clover, stitchwort, etc. All adds to the diversity. 🙂
Tammy
Hi Kate,
Hedges have to be managed at some point, otherwise they turn into a line of trees. Hedgelink has a wealth of information about managing hedges here: hedgelink.org.uk
Also the People’s Trust for Endangered Species have created an app specifically for landowners to assess their hedges and provide advice on how to manage each individual hedge; find out more and download it from here: https://hedgerowsurvey.ptes.org/healthy-hedgerows-surveyI hope that helps.
Tammy
