Newts: This Time It's Personal

[iainjclark]

Our newts are still here. Hurray! The pond froze over very convincingly several times over the last couple of months and I'd begun to fear the worst, but today Janet began cleaning out plants and gunge and general detritus and found both an adult newt and a baby newtlet¹.



The little one still has gills but is much bigger than the last ones we saw back in September - at least an inch long now. The older one looks like a Palmate newt, which is the kind we thought we had last year. If it's been in the pond all winter it must be very good at holding its breath and own a thick woolen scarf. Maybe it hid in our woodpile and has just decided to pop into the pond for a quick bath. Who knows.

Janet is extremely pleased. Newts are one of the main reasons we built the pond.
--
¹ Technical term.

Comments

[fba.livejournal.com]

I don't think any of the frogs made it through the winter. We probably ought to have put a ball in the pond really...

[iainjclark.livejournal.com]

We belatedly put a tennis ball in the pond but it didn't seem to make much difference -- just became frozen hard into the ice, meaning I had to break the ice anyway.