Snow sweeping: did it work (see comment from Daffy)?

Daffy in the comments swept the snow from her pond – and hey presto, no frog mortalities this year.

(I know, I know, one swallow etc etc).

I’ll review the first Big Pond Thaw forms we’ve received later.

After the snow and ice

Just like last year we are getting reports of frog and fish mortalities from garden ponds.

If you need advice, check our website.

To help improve things in the future, we would be very grateful if you could spend a few minutes completing a Big Pond Thaw form.

 

Milk – a dangerous substance?

Most people think milk is harmless.

But in the wrong hands and in the wrong place it can be a dangerous substance – for life in freshwater. When it spills into water in any quantity it can use up oxygen and add large quantities of nutrients to the water. Fortunately it’s not actually toxic! In fact, milk can be as bad as letting raw sewage wash into the water.

Normally in cold weather, it’s against the rules to spread milk on the farmland in cold weather because it can quickly run straight over the frozen land into ponds, streams and rivers.

But in the exceptional cold weather, as you can see here, the Environment Agency is trying to help farmers by relaxing the rules on the disposal of uncollected milk.

So it’s allowing farmers to tip milk onto frozen land for the time being, when there’s no alternative way of getting rid of it and provided it doesn’t wash into the water to cause pollution.

It’s one of those tricky situations where rules, to be practical, have to be relaxed.

A hidden impact on the freshwater environment

A pile of tile drains dug up from fields in Sussex

I found this picture on my phone the other day – which I took early this year in Suffolk.

The picture shows a pile of clay land drains dug up during pond management work.

They are hidden from daily view, and conceal one of the least understood of environmental impacts – largely because it is unseen: the enormous network of land drains that underlie much of the land.

Unless you’re involved in land management – a farmer, a nature reserve manager, digging ponds – it’s not easy to appreciate quite how widespread land drainage is. Something like 6-7 million hectares of land is drained: that’s about a third of the entire country; and around 70% of farmed land.

Land drainage is essential to modern agriculture because most crops don’t grow well, or at all, in the wet. Indeed, just about the only thing that you can grow on wet land is animals.

Land drainage all but eliminates temporary ponds: millions of small waterbodies – never mapped, impossible to quantify, have probably been removed by this process. And moving water quickly from one place to another by drainage has many other impacts on freshwaters generally.

Managing the impact of drainage is very difficult – it’s essential for modern farming and no solution has been found to preventing the impacts it causes.

Peter…a man after my own heart!

See the Comment from Peter – somewhere over the pond, out on that lonesome prairie.

On the second day of Christmas….

“On the second day of Christmas my true love gave to me……

“……two Crested Newts, and a Pipistrelle in a Pear Tree.”

Only in this case, she really did give this by buying me one of our Give and Let Live gifts – which help to fund pond creation for endangered freshwater plants and animals.

You’ll probably be able to guess the remaining 10 animals and plants that fit the rhyme – though we did have trouble fitting in Lesser Silver Water Beetle, which doesn’t really scan.

See the Pond Conservation home page: http://www.pondconservation.org.uk/

 

Man snaps snake snapping-up frog

Like these pictures which appear in the Worcester News.

Frogs like garden ponds and grass snakes like frogs: ergo, grass snakes like garden ponds too.

 

This caught my eye from Oxfordshire

A snippet from Oxfordshire:

I read in our local Oxfordshire Nature Conservation Forum News the suggestion that, as a result of the spread of signal crayfish, we may in coming years witness wholesale loss of populations of ‘many species and populations of fish, amphibians and macroinvertebrates from our rivers and lakes‘.

Fish, maybe. Most fish live in the same kind of places as Signal Crayfish. Amphibians and invertebrates? I’m not so sure. Most amphibians don’t go near rivers – so probably don’t come too much into contact with Signal Crayfish. Invertebrates – well, river ones maybe. But since 70% of freshwater macroinvertebrate species can be found in ponds, which are still are fairly rarely colonised by Signal Crayfish, again I think the ‘wholesale loss’ of many species might not happen.

To understand freshwater you need a landscape approach, and also to think about all kinds of waterbodies, not just the ones studied by freshwater biologists!

Is this the world’s biggest group of ponds?

The Prairie Pothole Region - you can get an idea of the scale from the size of Hudson Bay in the top right corner!

Scanning my Twitter account I noted plans to increase protection for ponds in the North American Prairie Pothole Region.

To us is Britain this covers an almost unimaginably large area: 700,000 square kilometres.

Any guesses how big that is?

As big as Wales? Noooooo.

Try again,

As big as England? Noooooo.

Try bigger.

As big as the UK? Noooooo.

The Prairie Pothole Region is nearly 3 times bigger than the whole of the little old United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

You can see what this landscape looks like here.

If you’re interested in water and farming, this is worth a read

Brian Moss’s 2008 report on the effects of agriculture on water – published by the Royal Society – is well worth a read if you’re interested in either water or agriculture. It sets a lot of things in useful context.

And, as the Royal Society is one of the few publishers of science that makes it’s journals freely available, and Brian is one of the relatively small number of scientists who publish easily readable papers, this isn’t such a chore.

If you haven’t read this paper, its worth the time.