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When Joe Gray coppiced a patch of woodland on his Essex farm, he noticed that an abandoned pond sprang back into life after it was exposed to sunlight.
“It was a hole in the woods with some leaves in it – we didn’t think of it as a pond,” he says. Since then, he and his wife, Emma, have restored 11 “zombie” ponds on their 450-hectare (1,100-acre) regenerative farm. They’ve also persuaded a group of neighbouring farmers to bring back to life 80 ponds within a 3-mile (5km) radius near Braintree.
Ponds that were dried up, shaded over or dominated by brambles have been opened up to sunlight and dug out, and are now burgeoning with rare aquatic plants, dragonflies and great-crested newts – also providing food and water for birds and bats.
“It’s ideal for farmers,” says Emma Gray. “You get a lot of biodiversity bang for your buck in a marginal area for farming – you’re not taking productive land out but quickly you build up a network for species to hop across a landscape. It’s a no-brainer.”
This pond restoration effort has been galvanised by the Essex lost ponds project, a partnership between Essex Wildlife Trust and the RSPB. Volunteers have identified 17,200 ponds across the county, of which 10,400 have disappeared, mostly because of agricultural intensification in the 20th century. When tractors replaced horses, there was less need for ponds for livestock and when fields were enlarged and drained, and hedgerows grubbed up, many ponds were filled in.
Reviving old ponds is burgeoning across Britain thanks to the pioneering pond restoration work of Carl Sayer, a professor of geography at University College London, who has identified 8,000 “ghost” ponds (completely obliterated but identifiable via old maps) in Norfolk and has restored at least 50 ghost ponds and 400 zombie ponds – degraded, dried up but ready to be brought back to life.
“You could stand by a pond that’s been opened up to sunlight and marvel at it all day,” says Mark Nowers, the RSPB’s turtle dove conservation adviser in Essex. “The dragonflies, the pond-skaters, the whirligig beetles, the dragonflies, the birds flying overhead – it’s just pumping out nature into the farmed landscape.”
In Essex, the lost ponds project offers all farmers a free survey identifying ghost or zombie ponds that can be restored and the funding they can access to pay for it – which includes a fairly lucrative pot of money from housebuilders who must pay to create alternative sites for great-crested newts. The Farming Wildlife & Advisory Group (Fwag) East also helps farmers access pond restoration funds.
Some landowners are so enthused that they are just getting on with putting ponds back: one Essex estate, Faulkbourne, has already restored six of the 49 old ponds identified on their land without any funding.
“Our farmers are very supportive of wildlife,” says Darren Tansley of Essex Wildlife Trust. “For conservation bodies, farmers and citizen scientists to be working together on a project like this does us all some good.”
The ponds project is demonstrating to farmers that conservationists can be useful – helping them revive nature at no cost to their farming, as well as access new funds – while also reminding conservationists that farmers care about wildlife.
For Nowers, the project has introduced him to many farmers who want to save the turtle dove, one of Britain’s most endangered birds. Turtle doves need abundant and accessible seed-rich habitat and scrub or thick hedgerows to nest in, but are also assisted by restored ponds because they require access to fresh water close to nesting sites.
Other wildlife also flourishes. “It’s stepping stones for water vole,” says Tansley. “It’s for dragonflies and damsels and all of those plants that come back when you dig out a pond. If you’ve got that seedbed [in the muddy bottom of an old pond] you can regenerate plants that haven’t grown there for 150 years.”
Ponds are restored by opening up the south face – cutting back trees and vegetation such as brambles so sunlight can reach the water. Any trees such as willows growing in the old pond must be removed, for these drain the ponds dry.
The pond’s original profile is retained but sediment within it is removed until black mud at the bottom is reached, which may contain long-dormant seeds of aquatic plants.
The Grays are now helping other farms in their North Essex farm cluster (a group of neighbouring farmers who work together to restore soils, water quality and wildlife) to restore ponds and revive nature along the River Pant.
They’ve found just one problem: reviving an old pond looks drastic and destructive at first. When Joe Gray first cuts down trees and uses a digger to restore the pond’s profile, “it looks like a building site”, he admits.
“A small part of my job in the farm cluster is soothing the neighbours of farmers who have restored ponds,” says Emma Gray. “People are livid about it.”
That anger passes within a season, when they see the ponds spring back into life.
A wood-edge pond that the Grays restored a year ago is full of aquatic plants, and a recent pond-dip revealed it was brimming with aquatic life.
Ponds take little or no land out of food production. The Grays now devote 40% of their hectares to wildlife-restoring farm stewardship schemes but grow as much food as before, simply because they are now using only the most productive parts of their land. Their regenerative farming – not ploughing, and thereby boosting soil health and wider biodiversity – alongside seed mixes for wild birds attracts flocks of 1,000 linnet on to the farm in winter.
“There’s not a place in the county like it,” says Nowers of the resurgent birdlife on the Grays’ farm.
“We’re not the sort of farmers who want to see everything rewilded,” says Emma Gray. “We are passionate about growing food but it can be done in balance with nature.”
