Newts

Thursday 13th April 2023

I had a lovely day at the Climate Hub yesterday and then in the evening went off to Chailey for some newt survey training with Phlorum. This has to be done in the dark so we turned up at dusk and then set some bottle traps, did some searching with large torches and learnt a lot about newts! We are looking for Great Crested Newts (GCN) as they are protected, we might catch or see other newts (smooth or palmate) but we dont actually care about them for the purposes of the survey. This morning we were back at the pond to take a look and see if we had caught anything. This is a pond that they have surveyed over the last few years and there are normally lots of GCN but we didn't see any last night and we didn't have any in the traps. But we did have 6 other newts! So we had a good look at them to identify them - one palmate male which was the most interesting one. The pond is really difficult to access as you can see, how we managed not to g\fall in last night I dont know! This pond needs another 5 surveys done in the next few months so hopefully we will find some GCN then - also I hope I get the opportunity to do some of the surveys. Then back to the Climate Hub for another day there - overall a great couple of days!