check your gulley pots..

I guess it's a good time to check gulley pots on roads close to GCN ponds; I picked over 60 - mainly metamorphs - from one pot at a site in Herts today.  Hate to think how many others never get out; some of the animals were adults and very thin indeed.  Photos show a handful of animals from the pot and some waiting to be 'airlifted' out still in situ

Cheers Tim; too much time spent with the leapers and creepers I guess! Great thing about digital photography is you can delete the 99.9% rubbish pictures too..

Thanks for the info Paul; I have heard of some enlightened councils / developers using mesh as you describe, but of course this is generally only for new road / housing developments.  At least I was able to lift the grill on this gulley pot without a crowbar, and I have put a branch in it to act as a ladder for any unlucky newts caught in the future.

Cheers

Will

This is a well known problem in herpetological circles but not with engineers and highway designers. We have several toad crossings where our members have to cover the road gullies over with wire mesh to prevent the animals falling in and getting trapped. However in most places we have to redo this each year as the owners (on private roads) or highway authorities won't let us leave the mesh on after the toad patrols have finished, which means that returning adult amphibians and later on metamorphs leaving the ponds will get trapped and die.
Most road gullies are the form known as trapped gullies with the outlet pipe half way up the smooth side and a deep well of grotty water in the bottom where amphibians eventually die. Once they fall in there is no way out without human intervention. It is even worse when they have kerbs behind the gullies as these guide amphibians along the edge of the road until they fall in the gullies. Certainly Matthew Ellis from CCW was highlighting this problem many years ago where they found large numbers of GCN in gullies at the ends of roads on an industrial estate where the gullies were placed right in the corners of the kerbs to ensure they caught anything going either way!

PS They are used to, in theory, improve the quality of surface water run-off by trapping sediment in the gulley, but except in very slight rain they don't do that either as except for coarse grit most of the fine material with their attached oil, heavy metals etc are washed through. We need a campaign against them but who's going to launch it then ?