Ramsey Heights Nature Reserve is important for its great crested newts and aquatic insects, such as diving beetles, and this requires periodic management during the autumn and winter months to maintain the balance of open water, reedbed, scrub and grassland.

Over the winter you may have noticed that scrub has been cut back around the meadows, to benefit butterflies and the yellow meadow ants and their anthills. A variety of wild flowers will grow on the anthills, attracting butterflies and other insects. The anthills also attract green woodpeckers, which feed on the ants. This woodpecker isn't confined to nature reserves being a common sight in parks and your own back garden, as I have found in my own garden in recent weeks.

Scrub has also been cut back to allow more light to get to some of the ponds. Additional light benefits some invertebrates and smaller aquatic plants, which the newts and dragonflies lay their eggs on; not all the ponds are clear of shade, as having a mixture of shaded and exposed ponds helps to maintain the variety of invertebrates.

Reedbeds are cut on rotation, to produce fresh growth. The reedbeds are used by a wide range of insects, birds and mammals and management can often reveal the presence of our smallest rodent, the harvest mouse; a species we are surveying for at the moment by seeking out its nests.

In other cases, common reed will have been cut in preparation for pond clearance and other types of pond restoration. The reed is then stacked up into 'habitat piles' and is used by a whole host of wildlife, such as insects, basking common lizards and also nesting grass snakes; both are common species in the Great Fen. The warmth generated by decomposing vegetation inside the piles helps incubate the snakes eggs, which is why you might encounter one by your compost heap.

The restoration work at Ramsey Heights will also involve changing the shape of the ponds, to give them gently sloping sides and shallow shelves. The ponds at Ramsey Heights are the result of clay removal, to make bricks, but they are often deep and steep sided. Reprofiling provides shallow water for newts and other wildlife to breed in; their young can grow faster in the warm conditions provided by shallow water.

This conservation work may require the ponds to be drained of water in the winter, when most of the newts are not using them, allowing the work to be more effective. As in your own garden, ponds need to undergo periodic clearance, to remove the build-up of dead plants and sediment. This can be a smelly business, as you may have noticed; the mud in the bottom of the ponds moves, as the water is drained, releasing trapped gases. The ponds are being left to refill with rain water (or the snow today), both being a much better source for wildlife than tap water. More of this restoration work will take place later this year, after the wildlife has finished breeding.

In the meantime, the muddy edges are perfect for birds seeking insects and other invertebrates to eat, and grey wagtails and snipe will take advantage of this habitat. On a grander scale, other sites in the Great Fen have much larger ponds, pools and meres, and they are being visited by a range of wildlife right now. As spring arrives, snipe will be displaying around the edges and in the air above, as you can read in the latest sightings.

Below the water, amphibians have already started to arrive to breed, such as smooth newts, great crested newts, and common toads. Amphibians have been making their way across the countryside, to reach our 'resort' for reptiles and amphibians at the Great Fen, and this migration will continue in the coming weeks. You may see volunteers out on 'toad patrol' near you, on a spring evening, as they chaperone these amorous amphibians across the road; as the toads move from their hibernation sites to their favourite breeding ponds.

The great crested newt is a protected species, which has its stronghold in the UK, particularly in the Peterborough brick-pits. It is illegal to disturb the newts, so we carry out a lot of the restoration when they are hibernating in winter on the land rather than when they are in water.

To find out how many newts we have and how they use the ponds, we monitor them by photographing their undersides, which have unique black and orange spotted patterns. The pattern is unique to the individual; not a newt fingerprint, but a newt tummy print! The monitoring allows us to learn which newts arrive at a particular pond first, if they use more than one pond in a year, and which ponds they like the most; is the restoration working?

Last year, we surveyed 67 of the ponds in the Great Fen for great crested newts. This was part of the ongoing monitoring of clusters of ponds at Ramsey Heights, and at Woodwalton Fen, but also checking for the presence of newts in ponds not recently surveyed. I covered this work and other topics in an update I gave to over 100 assembled Wildlife Trust volunteers, at our Monitoring and Research Conference this month. I was reporting on the highlights and achievements of 2022, which were numerous, ranging from our first breeding marsh harriers on the restoration land to our first glow-worm survey. Much of the data gathered was thanks to the volunteers, who we can't thank enough for their ongoing support.

Last year, the volunteers contributed nearly 1600 hours of time to monitoring the Great Fen. This year, we are already off to a great start, with the harvest mouse nest surveys; contributing to our special focus on mammals in 2023. Amphibians surveys, bird surveys, bats surveys, butterfly and dragonfly surveys, moth surveys and plant surveys are just some of the activities volunteers will be helping with this year.

Thanks to the support on may more of you (your donations to be precise), more resorts for reptiles and amphibians will be created in the coming years. Now that the 'Landmark Appeal' to purchase Speechly's Farm has been successful in reaching it's target, and the National Lottery Heritage Fund have confirmed their award of the next phase of our 'Peatland Progress' project, we will be forging ahead with more restoration. We will be swinging into action over the next five years, creating new ponds, meres, reedbeds and other habitats, further enhancing the Great Fen Living Landscape; further donations to the appeal will go towards this restoration work.

If your club or society would like to know more about the amphibians and reptiles of the Great Fen, or the other wildlife benefitting from the past, present and future fenland restoration, please do contacts us to arrange a talk. You may also like to join us in July, for our first glow-worm walk at the Great Fen; keep checking our our events page for details or this and other opportunities to get closer to wildlife this year.

Henry Stanier (Great Fen Monitoring & Research Officer)