There is something much more primordial about a newt than, say, a frog or a toad. Perhaps it's the dragging crocodilian gait, or the slightly frilled backbone.
After the wet and dismal weekend, I take a tentative stroll in the garden on a clear and bright Tuesday morning, and discover the first newt of the year sitting motionless at the bottom of the pond. I know it has been down there all winter, but the combination of dry day (getting me out), clear water and the slanting rays of the sun, have all conspired to make this an exciting event.
There is something much more primordial about a newt than, say, a frog or a toad. Perhaps it’s the dragging crocodilian gait, or the slightly frilled backbone. I always feel a quiver of delight when I see these secretive and beautiful creatures.
Ours are just the common or smooth newt, Lissotriton vulgaris. They may be ‘common’ compared to other species, but I’m still pretty impressed they managed to colonize our pool; they had to climb up the sides of the three railway sleepers that make the wall of the pond.
Now what I’d really like to find in there would be great crested newts. I have to be honest, though, not much chance of that here in East Dulwich. I have a particularly soft spot for the great crested - monsters by comparison - I used to keep them as pets.
We used to find them in the dew ponds dotted across the South Downs behind my parents’ house and take them home in the empty Tupperware, after ham and cheese sandwiches were scoffed. They were easy to catch in the gently slanting shallows of the saucer-shaped ponds, either using a small pond-dipping net, or sometimes with our bare hands. Very occasionally there was also a grass snake, enjoying the newts in a rather more biological way.
To a 10-year-old the great crested newts seemed like miniature dinosaurs and, quite literally, a handful. I kept them in my bedroom, in an old fish-tank half full of water and rocks and fed them on cubes of luncheon meat or the occasional tiny slug. Eventually they would get tipped into the garden ponds, two ceramic butler sinks sunk into the soil, and they lived there for several years.
As far as I know the newts still breed in those old dew ponds on the Downs. I wonder if that grass-snake is still eating them?
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