Inside the chow mein box, curled up in some soil is a tiny newtlet, or is it a newtling? Anyway, a baby newt.
Saturday afternoon and the doorbell rings. It's the neighbours. They haven't come round to complain about me noisily chasing nearly four-year-old up and down the lawn; they have a prize to show. I immediately recognize the plastic container as one of those from the local Chinese takeaway; I also use them for 'show and tell' sessions. They've found a 'lizardy' thing whilst digging up the end of the garden, and wonder what it is.
Inside the chow mein box, curled up in some soil is a tiny newtlet, or is it a newtling? Anyway, a baby newt. This is fantastic. It's only 35mm long, shrivelled and wrinkled and barely moving. It might be one of the offspring that I spotted last summer in our small pond, that has waddled off only half a dozen metres to a quiet spot near the fence.
The main concern is what to do with it. The answer is put it back in a similar spot on the loose damp soil, cover it up again with a piece of wood or a rock, and let it be. Newts reach sexual maturity at about three years, so it will not need to return to the water until March 2011 at the earliest. In the meantime it will come out each night from about March to October and prowl about hunting bugs, slugs and any other small creeping things it can get its jaws around.
I always get slightly irritated when I read one of the kids' story books, in which someone discovers a frog or toad in the garden and their subsequent quest to find a suitable aquatic home for its release. Amphibians only go into water to breed in spring. Most of the rest of the time they try to get away from the water, which attracts herons and other predators, so the last thing they want is to be dumped back in it at some inappropriate time of the year.
The dried out wrinkly skin is fine too. It's their normal costume. These other two, pictured left, were photographed in the middle of an oak woodland in June a few years ago. They were a bit larger and might have returned to the pond of their birth the following March, but they were quite happy in the leaf litter where I found them.
The clue to these animals' double lives is in their name — amphibian comes from the Greek root amphi, meaning 'on both sides', and bios meaning 'life'; they live quite happily on both sides, in water and on land. Ambidextrous and ambiguous share similar derivations, but I'm going to leave the subject of left- or right-handedness in newts until I've done a bit more research.
PS. While typing this I hear a loud plaintiff yowling from just outside the back door. I peer out through the glass, expecting to find one of our cats, and one of the neighbours', head to head, tail and hackles up, bleating at each other in top voice, but can't see anything. So I step outside and am met with a caterwauling that could break breeze blocks. I can't believe it — the cat is locked in the guinea-pig hutch. Stupid beast. How did it get in there? Then it dawns on me. The pig had been out on the lawn all day, until the rain and hail about 4 o'clock and I threw him back in. The cat must have been asleep on the hay when the hutch-owner returned to find his sleeping quarters invaded by uninvited lodger. The guinea-pig is unharmed, despite his rodent evolutionary history, but I can't get the image out of my mind. Nor the idea that piggish thoughts were probably along the lines of "it is nice to have guests once in a while, but I wish he'd go home now, I'd like to get to bed."
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