In Norfolk alone we have lost an estimated 8,000 ponds since 1950, largely due  to an increase in demand for land from intensive agriculture.

A study from University College London and the Norfolk Ponds Project estimate we have around 23,000 remaining today in the County.

Many of these incredible, long suffering habitats are in desperate need of our help.

The wonderful thing is that rejuvenation can happen in a very short amount of time.

WildEast's Laura Hampton has been out on a farm visit in Dereham with farmer and pond enthusiast Nick Anema to find out more.

Laura - 'So how did it all start?'

Nick - 'We saw an advert in some literature from the Farm Conservation Network about UCL's Ghost Pond Project  (run in partnership with the Norfolk Pond Project,). They were asking farmers to get in touch if they had any old ponds that had been filled in. We couldn't believe our luck.

Emily Alderton from UCL was doing a PHD project on the recording of ghost ponds,  to see how long the seed bank from dormant aquatic plants remained viable.  We'd already looked at old first edition ordinance survey maps dating back to 1866, and because our pond wasn’t on them, we knew it must have been filled in before then.  Having a pond on the farm that we could prove had been filled in for over a hundred years was quite unusual I think, and a big draw.

We're not entirely sure why that particular pond was filled in so long ago. Most of them were lost after the Second World War to make way for modern farming. There could have been a number of reasons who they chose to fill it in. Changes in crops or animal use. It looked as though they had deliberately filled it in because there was a layer of brash at the bottom, which created a hard surface for the horse and cart to stand on when bringing in dirt to fill it in.'

Laura - 'It must be no mean feat to dig out a ghost pond. Talk me through the process.'

Nick - 'First of all you dig a test hole to see if you can find that vital dark layer of sediment at the bottom.  It was actually a little nerve wracking. I suddenly became worried we had it all wrong, and were digging in the wrong place. There were smiles all round when we did finally come across it I can tell you. Then it’s a case of following the black sediment line to the edges, and finding somewhere to put the soil.'

Laura - 'So you dig out the pond. You leave it for a year. You leave it for two years. It’s surprising how quickly a pond can go from looking like a building site to a beautiful oasis of calm. It must have been a fascinating process to witness.'

Nick - 'When we first dug out the pond it looked horrific. It looked as though a bomb had gone off. But in just the space of a year, the transformation was just incredible. Because the plants they have been buried for so long, they seem to want to germinate immediately. As soon as they see some sunlight, they’re off. Normally they wouldn’t germinate until spring, but because they are so desperate to grow and reproduce, you get a lot of growth straight off the bat.'

Laura - 'We'll get back to the story of your beautiful ponds in a minute, but first please just describe this beautiful water meadow stretching out in front of us.''

Nick - 'It's a wet grassy field with lots of hard rush bordered by the river. No matter how many cows you get on here the biodiversity remains incredibly high because they'll not eat the bitter longer tussocky grasses. This means that at sward height there is always lots of nature. We also have people come down here to do surveys of the river. They found it was one of the best areas for BullHeads because it has a lot of water coming from a spring originating in that field there.

Laura - ‘So back to the ghost pond. You’ve dug it out, what happens next.’ 

Nick - 'The pond was dug out in October 2013 and it was warm for that time of year. There was still a few insects about. The same day we dug it out we had a dragon fly land in it and lay its eggs. It was incredible! Within 24 hours of it being opened up!

The next year we found frog spawn and the rest as they say is history. The wonderful thing about revitalising old ponds is that the seed bank is already there. You get so much more biodiversity, and much quicker. 

Another advantage is that you can't really do any harm, because there is nothing there to start with.
Everything is already there, in the silt layer. It's incredible to think that you might be the one to help bring back an old an aquatic plant, whose seed has been protected and buried for over a century.'

Laura - ‘Paint a picture for me. What does this pond look like, year one, year two, year five.’

Nick - 'Year one, starting in the Autumn, even by spring you are starting to get the first early plants colonising, like the stonewort, very short fine leafed plants. They come back quite quickly. Then come things like the crowfoot and finally the broad-leafed pond weeds start to come back in as well. 

Laura - 'We've just spent time admiring your inky-black Marlpit, which I understand requires a slightly different approach to restoration. In what way?'

Nick - 'With this particular pond, the only previous management I’d done was in 2001, when I coppiced the hedge around it. Ponds need light and airflow across them. That's all we were allowed to do. At that point in time the thinking was that you really didn’t want to mess around with a pond too much because you didn’t want to affect all of the protected species. The approach now is very different.

What we discovered was that by removing the silt, the level of biodiversity that returned is just incredible. Dr Carl Sayer has some fantastic recordings of before and after a restoration. The insect activity and the aquatic species that live there is just amazing. It’s not something you can see, it’s something you can hear. Before they were quiet and lifeless. Now they are noisy and teaming with life. 

Because the second pond is deeper, it took a little longer for some of the plants to come back. Ultimately though, it's a similar kind of a pond. Another one of the students that came here looked into aquatic pond insects, and how much higher in food value they are compared to terrestrial insects. Much higher in omega 3 oils. We also had another chap from the Norfolk Ponds Project, Andy Hind, who was looking at bats. Where the river was, and the ponds and the trees, there were so many more bats compared to even just a hundred meters away.'

Laura - 'We’ve spoken largely about ponds so far, but there are also some incredible wet meadows too. What do they being in terms of biodiveristy?

Nick - 'These fields that we are in now, are County Wildlife Sites, and they are fantastic for biodiversity. We get loads of different flowers that are great for pollinators and insects.  On a warm summers day, it is absolutely alive with grasshoppers and crickets. 

So we have these hard rushes, this juncus grass, and soft rush as well. To keep biodiversity levels in check we only have one cow per hectare. We don’t want cattle treading on ground nesting birds. It’s a really tricky thing to get right. You under graze and this habitat turns into bramble and scrub and you reduce its biodiversity. You over graze and you take out some of the plants and orchids. You need to get that balance right.'

Laura -  'Talk to me about here kinds of environmental measures you’ve put into the River Tud.'

'With the River Tud, the first thing we did was to put in 6 metre environmental margins around every ditch and along the river.  That’s now been extended through widening the margins, and also a pollen vector crop which will go next year and so we are really reducing the amount of run-off from the fields getting into the river. 

There are several reasons why run-off is bad. It can contain chemicals, and sprays and things that have been used on the crops, but also it’s the phosphates and nitrates from the manures that have been applied, if the soil gets in that has a lot pf phosphate you will get lots of it in the river water which will encourage algal blooms.

For more information - go to Nick's website