The Caerlaverock Estate in Dumfriesshire, owned by Lady Clare Kerr and her husband, former Tory minister Nick Hurd, is launching a new pond-building project to help save Scotland's rarest amphibian, the natterjack toad. The scheme forms part of the historic estate's wider conservation efforts, which already include restoring wetlands, wildlife corridors and meadows across its roughly 6,000 acres of saltmarsh and wetland along the Solway Firth, an area also crucial for wintering wildfowl such as the entire Svalbard barnacle goose population.

The project will create 24 new ponds, seven of which are specifically designed for natterjack toads, whose numbers have collapsed from around 2,000 adults recorded in a 1976 survey to fewer than 100 in every Scottish survey since 2006. The specialised ponds are designed to change with the seasons, filling for migratory wildfowl in winter, shrinking in spring to trigger toad spawning, and supporting damselflies and insects in summer, while the remaining 17 ponds will serve broader habitat and water restoration purposes. The scheme, developed with input from estate tenants and vetted by ecologists, has secured funding from the Scottish Government's Nature Restoration Fund via NatureScot, whose head of funding, Iain Sime, said habitat loss remains one of the biggest threats to the species.