Amphibians
in
The North-West of England is a
stronghold of the Great Crested Newt in the
Male Crested Newt
A number of sites with Great Cresteds are marked on the NBN website, but few are of these are recent records. Very valuable habitat was destroyed when Bredbury clay pits were lost to the M60 motorway; they were located near to the site of the Crookilley roundabout. The Council made insufficient plans for mitigation, & even these were not carried through; I’m quoting here from a letter sent to me by Charles Hamilton (see below), who was involved in attempts at mitigation made by local naturalists – ‘ This was a varied site, with mounds & 5 or 6 ponds varying from wet scrapes to sizeable deep pools……………The ponds were very rich with breeding great crested & smooth newts, frogs bred in many areas, & one pond was brilliant for toads – there was a very strong but unconfirmed report of Natterjacks in the sandy area near to Crookilley Wood………………Prof. Clive Stace of Manchester University Botany Department found over 100 species of flowering plants during the course of a single visit’.
Two sites
were ear-marked for translocation. One
lies between the Bredbury to Reddish railway line & a motorway slip-road –
this is now occupied by a squatter who grazes horses; there is a small pond on
the site, but no access – there is good foraging/overwintering habitat along
the steep, heavily vegetated motorway embankment nearby, but any amphibian
population is likely to be small. The
second site was close to the local re-cycling plant across
Mitigation is very much better now, however – several ponds created as mitigation for the A34 by-pass near Stanley Green, which were surveyed this year (2010), still contain a healthy population of great cresteds.
Female Crested Newt & Male Smooth Newt
There are several sites which have great potential for amphibians in general, but which have very few, if any, because of the prevalence of fish, which prey on amphibian larvae (tadpoles etc. – with the exception of toad tadpoles – fish find these unpalatable); this is particularly true of Bird-hide Marsh, alongside the River Etherow at Roach Wood SSSI – the marsh has extensive rough habitat, ideal for the adults of newts & frogs, but the pool & ditches have large numbers of fish, & so are useless as breeding habitat – Natural England have shown no interest in attempting to remove the fish; even sadder, a thriving amphibian population would do a great deal to encourage Grass Snakes, which, like other Reptiles, seem to be very scarce in Stockport – a Grass Snake was seen in Roach Wood itself, about ten years ago, but none have been seen since, & numbers are likely to be very small in the absence of amphibian prey.
Two other
sites which I surveyed in 2009, Gatley Carrs & Reddish Vale, have very
suitable habitat, but their potential is drastically reduced because of the
presence of fish. A survey of two ponds
in
Female Crested Newt in bottle-trap
Palmate Newts are not common or widely distributed in Stockport, but there are seven records from Marple Bridge & Mellor for the years 1984 to 1988 (RECORD).
There are records
of Smooth Newts from many areas, including Gatley (ponds in
Great Cresteds have been found at Woodbank Park; Reddish Vale; Romiley (edge of Romiley Golf Course); Scholes Park, Gatley; Cheadle (from the map reference given, this must be the site now called Wright’s Wood – there are no newts here currently, as the pond at one time became grossly polluted); Bramhall Golf Course; a site at Brook Bottom (Mary Swann’s records), on the Derbyshire border (near New Mills); most of these records (from the NBN website, which includes records from GMEU, RECORD, & the Biological Records Centre) are not recent, mostly dating from the 1980s.
Frogs & Toads have been reported from many sites within the Borough – many of the records are recent, especially for Frogs; this is not to say that their continued status as relatively common amphibian species should be taken for granted.
Crested Newts are protected under The Wildlife & countryside Act – it’s against the law to kill or injure them, or to capture or handle them without a licence.
Male & Female Crested Newts & Male Smooths
Memories of a Toad Hunting Man
Charles Hamilton’s recollections of amphibians in
Frogs & Toads
Way back in
the 1940s there were two sizable ponds between Broadway & Kingsway in
Bredbury. We were not supposed to fish
there, but in the slightly smaller one there were good colonies of breeding
frogs & toads, though we never found newts.
Sometime in the 1970s I took part in
a survey by (I think) English Nature, into frog breeding sites – I offered my
services, assuming I’d be given an area of about 10 square kilometres, but
found I’d been allocated 100, so I only scratched the surface. I did take holidays when they started to
spawn, but after all this time, memory is faint.
I noted a patch of
some 300+ frogs on the feeder canal at Etherow, near where it passes the main
lake at the upstream end; they disappeared as the Canada Geese increased, &
I haven’t seen a patch of frog-spawn in the canal for years, but one of the
pools near the river on Roach Wood Marsh had frogs within the last ten years.
Frogs spawned in the pool off
Cowlisher Brow, Romiley, in the 1970s.
Most years they spawn in my pond but we see no tadpoles as the newts eat
them. The pond at
I’m only aware of two sites
where toads have spawned in recent years. One was in the Peak Forest Canal on
the Romiley end of the aqueduct, & that was a few years ago, but spawn can
be found fairly regularly in the small pool at the upstream end of the main
lake at Etherow. The
Toads are seen on most occasions when volunteers collect the grass cuttings by hand on various Etherow sites, so they must breed somewhere in the Park. Back in the 70s & early 80s the Wildlife Trust & Parks Department, plus assorted Councillors, had an annual gathering at Keg Cottage in the middle of Keg Wood (Etherow CP) – it was often in late spring, & the journey back through the Park was quite an experience, as hundreds of toads could be seen crossing the roads.
Newts
My memories of Great Crested Newts
go back to the mid-1940s, when we used to catch them at the Cemetery ponds,
Highfield, Bredbury; these ponds are still there, but what they contain is
anyone’s guess. The other site was the
pool at the base of the Bredbury Council tip, which is now lost under the
estate off
As a youngster we found Smooth Newts
everywhere, Peak Forest Canal in Romiley & Woodley, in the flooded
mineshaft at Bredbury, and most (though not all) ponds.
Palmate Newts are I think still in
the pond adjacent to Tangshutt Fields, Romiley, & I did find some years ago
up on the hills near Mellor. My garden
colony is about 40 strong, & breeds well every year.
The most amazing site in my
experience of GCNs was near Whitchurch,
Reptiles
Reptiles seem to be very poorly recorded in Stockport, judging by the tiny number of records on the NBN website – no definite records for SJ98; records for SJ88 probably refer to the area round Lindow Moss; just three records for SJ99, one for each of Slow-worm, Common Lizard, & Grass Snake – as referred to above, a Grass Snake was reported from Roach Wood, Compstall, about ten years ago.
The best
way to see them is to be out early on sunny Spring days, to catch them sunning
themselves – this may be on rocks, at the side of tracks, etc.; Slow-worms can
be found in gardens – one was supposedly seen in an allotment in the
Anyone with an interest in Herpetology may wish to join the Amphibian & Reptile Group of South Manchester – please contact Tim Rogers at tim.rogers33@ntlworld.com, or Emma Wilson at emma.wilson@stockport.gov.uk